Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[126] (1848), allies him rather with the Macaulay school of essayists than with the more personal and leisurely Irving tradition. Indeed, it was Whipple's brilliant article on Macaulay, written in 1843, that made its author known to the literary world of Boston, where Whipple, a young man of twenty-four, was then employed in the brokerage business; and Macaulay's style is reflected in much of the earlier work of his American admirer. In the lectures and essays contained in the volumes entitled Literature and life (1871) and Character and characteristic men (1877) Whipple continued to reveal that really keen penetration into the strata of values and that ready entrance into the temperament of his subject which had been shown in his earlier appraisals of men and books. There are few better essays on British critics than Whipple's paper wherein, in discussing Jeffrey, to whose charm of wit he is ‘by no means insensible,’ Whipple not only refers with succinct phraseology to the ‘cool and provoking dogmatism’ and ‘the insulting tone of fairness’ of the British critic; but goes deeper into the nature of aesthetics, as where he writes: ‘By making beauty dependent on the association of external things with the ordinary emotions and affection; of our nature, by denying its existence both as an inward sense and as outward reality, he substantially annihilates it.’ Then again, of Hazlitt: ‘He was naturally shy and despairing of his own powers, but his dogmatism was of that turbulent kind which comes from passion and self-distrust.’ Sheridan, Fielding, Carlyle, and the earlier English dramatists, beginning with Marlowe and Ben Jonson, are all treated with the sympathy of the man of letters who is, at the same time, the student of national and epochal tendencies; and so, too, in his estimates of Rufus Choate, Emerson, Motley, Sumner, and others of our own writers.

In the centennial year of American independence, Whipple contributed to Harper's magazine a paper entitled The first century of the Republic, in which he reviewed the development of American literature and showed how its course had been ‘subsidiary to the general movement of the American mind.’ In agreeing with this point of view, Stedman, in his Poets of America (1885), expands the thesis: ‘Our imagination has found exercise in the subjugation of a continent, in war, politics, and government, in inventive and constructive energy, in ’