Excerpt from The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 1 of 3: Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I T was a hard saying of a Spanish aphorist of the seventeenth century that to equal a predecessor one must have twice his worth. We should deprecate the application of that. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.