"
These extravagant claims incited fresh attacks. One British writer
insisted that Federal America had done nothing either to extend,
diversify, or embellish the sphere of human knowledge, and could produce
nothing to bring her intellectual efforts into any sort of comparison
with those of Europe. "Noah Webster, we are afraid," said he, "still
occupies the first place in criticism, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow
in poetry, and Mr. Justice Marshall in history." Another pronounced
the celebrated Philosophic Hall in Philadelphia a "meeting house" for
the society, where its transactions were "scooped together" in the
"genuine dialect of tradesmen." Not only the published papers of the
Philosophic Society were held up to ridicule, but also John Quincy
Adams's _Letters from Silesia_, Marshall's _Life of Washington_,
Barlow's _Columbiad_, Dwight's poetry, and Lewis and Clark's history
of their expedition.
"But why should the Americans write books," asked the _Edinburgh
Review_, "when a six weeks' passage brings them in their own tongue
our sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads. Prairies,
steamboats, grist-mills are their natural objects for centuries to
come.
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