This was an article
in "The Church Review" (an Episcopal quarterly published at New Haven),
[Footnote: In the number for January, 1851.] written, I am told, by a
then young man who has since reached a high place in the ecclesiastical
body to which he belongs. The reviewer, in this case, had in a previous
article discussed the question of literary schools in America. Speaking
of the origin of the term "Lake School," he pronounced the epithet
_Lakers_ "the mere blunder of superficial wit and raillery." But
that did not prevent him from creating the absurd title of "Bay
writers," which he applied to all the writers about Boston, baptizing
them in the profane waters of Massachusetts Bay. "The Church Review" was
in the habit of devoting a good deal of its attention to criticism of
the Puritan movement which founded New England. Accordingly, "It is
time," announced this logician, in opening his batteries on Hawthorne,
"that the literary world should learn that Churchmen are, in a very
large proportion, their readers and book-buyers, and that the tastes and
principles of Churchmen have as good a right to be respected as those of
Puritans and Socialists." Yet, inconsistently enough, he declared that
Bay writers could not have grown to the stature of authors at all,
unless they had first shaken off the Puritan religion, and adopted "a
religion of indifference and unbelief." Thus, though attacking them as
Puritans and Socialists (this phrase was aimed at Brook Farm), he denied
that they were Puritans at all.
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