Romances and Novels. 171 



history of fictitious writing in that country/* Next 

 to Wieland, Goethe is respectably known as a 

 novelist, not only in his own country, but also 

 throughout Europe. In a word, in every cultivated 

 part of the European world novel writers have in- 

 credibly abounded, in modern times; but the 

 author has so little knowledge even of the names 

 of the principal works of this kind, and so much 

 less of their respective merits and demerits, that 

 he cannot undertake to speak of them in detail. 



America has given birth to few productions in 

 the department of romance or novel. Indeed, 

 no work of this nature deserving respectful notice, 

 had appeared in the United States prior to the 

 year 1798, when Mr. Charles B. Brown, of Phi- 

 ladelphia, published his Wieland, which has been 

 since followed by Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, Edgar 

 Huntly, and Jane Talbot, from the pen of the same 

 author. Mr. Brown discovers, in these several 

 productions, a vigorous imagination, a creative 

 fancy, strong powers of description, and great 

 command, and, in general, great felicity of lan- 

 guage. He has the honour of being the first 

 American who presented his countrymen with a 

 respectable specimen of fictitious history; and is 

 certainly the first who succeeded in gaining much 

 attention to his labours in this branch of literature. 



It was before observed that the eighteenth cen- 

 tury was the Age of Novels. Never was the lite- 

 rary world so deluged with the frivolous effusions 

 of ignorance and vanity, in this form, as within the 

 last thirty years. Every contemptible scribbler 

 has become an adventurer in this boundless field of 

 enterprise. Every votary of singular, and especi- 



e Lessing, a German critic, of great learning and acuteness, pronounced 

 The History of Agatbon to be one of the finest efforts of genius in the 

 eighteenth century ; nay, he called it the first and only novel. of the Ger- 

 mans, written for thinking men of classical taste. 



