Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[371] of Jay, Lee, and Dickinson; destined to be soon followed up with a long series of equally strong productions, to which Lord Chatham paid that fine tribute in his speech before the House of Lords on January 20, 1775. “I must declare and avow,” he said, “that in all my reading and observation — and it has been my favorite study — I have read Thucydides and have studied and admired the master-states of the world — for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in preference to the general Congress of Philadelphia.” Yet it is to be noticed further that here, as in other instances, the literary foresight in British criticism had already gone in advance of even the statesman's judgment, for Horace Walpole, the most brilliant of the literary men of his time, had predicted to his friend Mason, two years before the Declaration of Independence, that there would one day be a Thucydides in Boston and a Xenophon in New York.

It is interesting to know that such predictions were by degrees shadowed forth even among children in America, as they certainly were among those of us who, living in Cambridge as boys, were permitted the privilege of looking over whole boxes of Washington's yet unprinted