68 



Romans a Virpil, the French a Racine and Voitaire, 

 the English a Shakspeare and Milton, shouhJ this re- 

 proach be still true, we will enquire fro'i) what un- 

 friendly canses it !lias i)rocee(lcd, that the other coun- 

 tries of Europe andquarters of the earth shall not have 

 inscribed any name in the roll of poets.* But neither 

 has America produced ' one able mathematician, one 

 man of genius in a single art or a single science.' In 

 war we have j)roduced a Washington, whose memory 

 will be adored while liberty shall have votaries, whose 

 name will triumph over time, and will in future ages 

 assume its just station among the most celebrated wor- 

 thies of the world, when that wretched philosophy shall 

 be forgotten which would have arranged him among 

 the deo-eneracies of nature, in ])hysics we have pro- 

 duced a Franklin, than whom no one of the present age 

 has made more in)portant discoveries, nor has enriched 

 philosophy with more, or more ingenious solutions of 

 the })lienomena of nature. We have supposed Mr Rit- 

 tenhouse second to no astronomer living : that in ge- 

 nius he must be the first, because he is self-taught. As 

 an artist he has exhibited as groat a proof of mechani- 

 cal genius as the world has ever produced. He has 

 not indeed made a world ; but he has by imitation ap- 

 proached nearer its Maker than any man who has liv- 

 ed from the creation to this day.f As in ])hiIosophy 

 and war, so in government, in oratory, in painting, in 

 the plastic art, we might show that America, though 



* Has the world as yet proHucerl more than twn poets, ac- 

 knowleHged to be such by all nations? An Englishman, only, 

 reads Milton with delijiht, an Italian Tast^o, a Frencliman the 

 Henriade ; a Portugueso Camoens; but Homer and Virgil have 

 been the rapture of every age and nation: they are read with 

 enthusiasm in their originals by those who can read the originals, 

 and in translations by those who cannot. 



+ There are various ways of keeping truth out of sight. Mr 

 Rittenhouse's model of the planetary system has the plagiary 

 appelletion of an Orrery ; and the quaHrant invented by God- 

 frey, an American also, and with the aid of which the European 

 nations traverse the globe, is called Hadley's quadrant. 



