literature. It is perhaps wiser to accept this contention than to listen to those revolutionaries who wish to cut themselves off without a shilling of their inheritance, and who sternly bid our English ancestors never darken our doors again. But our national literature will never hold its due place nor perform its proper work in our consciousness till we reverse the orthodox contention and declare instead that the older English literature must forever be a part of American literature. It will always be too soon to substitute our own authors for Chaucer or Spenser or Shakespeare or Milton. They belong to the common past of all the great branches of the English-speaking peoples. They are an essential and glorious part of our common literary history, just as ante-Reformation theologians are a part of both Roman and Anglican ecclesiastical history.
Shakespeare and Milton are as important to us as they are to Englishmen. Yet as between Jeremy Taylor and Cotton Mather, for example, it begins to be clear that one is of high importance to the English and of relatively little importance to us. As we advance into the eighteenth century, the shifting of values becomes even more noticeable. We need not discriminate between Gulliver's Travels and Franklin's Autobiography, for both are classics of the world's literature, and we cannot afford to neglect either of them. But it is not too soon to declare that the collected writings of Franklin belong to the culture of an educated American, while the collected writings of Swift have pretty certainly
