[Howard was an American critic who published widely on American and English literature. His The Connecticut Wits (1943) is considered an authoritative guide to the subject of the Wits, their time period, and their writings. In the following excerpt from that work, Howard explores the early satirical writings of the Wits and concludes that their involvement in bitter public debate in periodicals took them away from more important literary work.]

During the years that followed the Revolution the United States faced the problem of restoring trade and commerce with neither the advantages nor the disadvantages of membership in the British Empire. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and, to a considerable extent, New York were looking across the ocean for prosperity; but Connecticut, although lacking a good seaport, had an excellent river highway to the interior, and the town of Hartford, on the edge of the upper valley, soon became the flourishing commercial center of the state. Trumbull had moved there as early as 1780, Barlow had taken a house in his neighborhood during the winter of 1782-83, and Lemuel Hopkins and his wife had arrived in 1784, making their residence with the Barlows until they were able to set up their own establishment. By the autumn of 1786 all three poets were substantial citizens. Trumbull was a successful, well-established lawyer with good connections and some prospects, if health and energy permitted, of a political future. Barlow, less successfully established in a profession, nevertheless was also a member of the Common Council and a person of some importance in the town. Hopkins had built up a professional reputation that made him so nearly Connecticut's leading physician that he had been specially called from Hartford to attend the aged and beloved Governor Jonathan Trumbull in his last illness. They had known one another for a long time; Hopkins had probably been one of the contributors to "The Correspondent," and they had all collaborated after a fashion upon Barlow's edition of Dr. Watts's Psalms. But their literary productivity had become very casual. One had been fairly well disillusioned concerning the prospect of achieving fame and fortune through literature; another was still waiting to test the results of his efforts; and the third, Hopkins, had never been stirred by any great literary ambition.

Hopkins, as a matter of fact, lacked the first requisite to practical literary ambition, for he was wholly skeptical concerning the patriotic optimism which most American poets seemed to accept as a necessary ingredient in successful composition. "My best compliments to Trumbull and Barlow," he had written Oliver Wolcott shortly before he moved to Hartford:

Tell them that I am glad we have some poets who have not liv'd long enough to see all the variety of folly and perversness the humane is capable of: for I hope posterity will judge of a century or two to come by their poetic prophecies provided no historian should think it worth his while to write a word about it.

Yet he was an exceptionally generous man, tolerant of his friends' faults; and, if he had a brusque, eccentric manner to match his ungainly figure and bright staring eyes, his sharp tongue could lay bare pretensions with an efficiency that even Trumbull had to admire. He had not attended Yale, but his professional achievements and his knowledge of the classics had been recognized by an honorary Master's degree in 1784. And he had demonstrated his individual talent for versification in the Connecticut Courant for November 7, 1785, by "A new and certain CURE for CANCERS! In an EPITAPH on a Patient Who Died of a Pimple in the Hands of an Infallible Doctor." From its beginning—

Here lies a fool flat on his back,
The victim of a Cancer Quack—
to its moralizing conclusion—

Go, readers, gentle, eke and simple,
If you have wart, or corn, or pimple;
To quack infallible apply;
Here's room enough for you to lie.
His skill triumphant still prevails,
For Death's a cure that never fails—

the poem announced, in almost every line, the appearance of a new writer whose rough, nervous wit was as stimulating in its matter-of-fact purpose as it was unpretentious of the "higher" literary aims of more ambitious men.

Such wit on the subject of medical quacks had aroused a host of vehement "enemies" when Trumbull tried it before the Revolution, but in the Hartford of 1785 it was almost completely lost amid the post-war concern for more gross and violent stimulants. The town may have been small enough to have a characteristic smell of new lumber, molasses, and old Jamaica, but it was frequented by men who had moved far abroad and were alert to everything that was happening in the new country which had just burst its colonial bounds. Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth—the "certain Jere" who had assisted the devil to inspire David Humphreys in New Haven nearly seven years before—was perhaps the leading host in the town; and, although he was still appreciative of literature, he was more concerned with the possibilities of making a fortune. The breadth of his interests, which ranged from poetry to politics, from land speculation to manufacturing, was the measure of Hartford. Some of its inhabitants and their numerous visitors occasionally got together in the evening to discuss philosophical and literary subjects, but they spent so much of their time talking of more "practical" matters that stronger-minded poets than the Connecticut Wits would have found their attention diverted from abstractions to immediate concerns.

Two topics of immediate concern played an important part in the origin of a new, co-operative literary venture by Trumbull, Barlow, Hopkins, and their regular visitor, David Humphreys: the disposal of the public lands and the growing influence of the debtor classes upon the government of neighboring states. The first, in all its complicated ramifications, provided the original motive for the satiric enterprise which formally introduced the Connecticut poets to the world as "wits"; the second provided a secondary motive and an excuse for their activities. As their work became more self-consciously literary and their wit began to form a burlesque epic, they found additional, more patriotic excuses for writing; but the beginning was neither patriotic nor entirely excusable.

The first of the land controversies which involved the Hartford poets and had some effect upon their writing grew out of the conflicting claims of Connecticut and Pennsylvania to the territory including the Wyoming Valley. This section of what is now Pennsylvania had been developed by the Susquehanna Company of New England interests and settled largely by Connecticut families. Doubtful titles, however, had caused a good deal of trouble. In 1782 a court of arbitration meeting in Trenton had awarded the section to Pennsylvania without settling the matter permanently, for the court's decision led to the "Pennymite and Yankee war" in 1784, when state authorities tried to enforce the award; and subsequent appeals to Congress to review the decision met with no response. The Susquehanna Company, meeting in Hartford in July, 1785, had voted to support its claims before Congress and, in the meantime, to offer inducements to "able-bodied and effective" men who would settle in the territory and protect the company's interests by force of arms. The company also induced Colonel Ethan Allen to interest himself in the business, apparently with some notion that if events justified it he might play the same role in the amputation of Wyoming Valley from Pennsylvania that he had played in removing Vermont from New York. Allen, after seeing his Reason: The Only Oracle of Man through the press, visited the settlers in April, 1786, paraded in full regimentals for the encouragement of the Yankees, promised to bring in a lot of Green Mountain Boys, and put the Pennsylvanians in a high state of excitement. On May 17 he was in Hartford to attend another meeting of the company and apparently to encourage its defiance of court, Congress, and the state of Pennsylvania; for in December, 1786, the organization of proprietors met and threw its full weight into an effort to protect its interests—an effort which, incidentally, turned out to be in vain.

The affair must have caused a large amount of talk in Hartford during the summer of 1786, when the numerous citizens interested were throwing straws in the political wind and planning the course of action they would adopt in the December meeting. In any case it affected the local poets in two ways. First, it roused Dr. Lemuel Hopkins to an outburst of disapproval. The Green Mountain colonel's book offended every standard of sense, orthodoxy, and rhetoric to which he subscribed; and the demagogy represented by Allen was more than could be stomached by a man who had seen the public incited before and had observed that, on such occasions, a certain text "grin'd horrible a ghastly smile" at him: "wo unto thee, oh land, when thy king is a fool." Accordingly, he burst forth in the American Mercury for July 27 with a satiric denunciation of "the seer of Antichrist," who a few months before had descended

To feed new mobs with Hell-born manna
In Gentile lands of Susquehanna,

with "one hand … clench'd to batter noses, While t'other scrawls 'gainst Paul and Moses." Individual and independent though Hopkins was, however, he could hardly have realized the complexities of the Susquehanna affair. For the event which provoked his denunciation involved at least one of his fellow-poets in land speculation and eventually led to Hopkins' own service as a literary cat's-paw for some of the very people who had sent Allen into Pennsylvania.

This second, indirect effect of the Susquehanna affair upon the activity of the poets was accomplished through the medium of Joel Barlow, who was interested in the affairs of the company and who served as secretary pro tem at the December meeting and afterward as one of the board of commissioners appointed to investigate the company's chances and act accordingly. The federal Congress had already attempted to compromise with Connecticut's land claims by guaranteeing the state's title to the Western Reserve; and, as a consequence, many of the speculators—including Barlow—turned their attention to the possibilities of opening the country on the banks of Lake Erie. Plans for the disposal of the Western Reserve were still undetermined; but it was generally understood that, whereas the United States was expecting to sell its western lands at the basic price of one dollar an acre, Connecticut was to undertake a quicker disposal at half that price. Details, however, remained to be settled, and in the summer of 1786 two schemes were under discussion. The first called for the sale of unlocated lands, with both state and Continental securities accepted at par in payment. The second proposed that the sale be made by townships, with the acceptance of Connecticut paper alone at par. The difference between the two plans was momentous. One encouraged a rapid sale and favored the large companies which could survey and locate the most desirable holdings; it also meant that the state would be paid in Continental obligations, which it could use to pay off a share of the national indebtedness that admittedly could not be paid by the current methods of taxation. The other looked toward the retirement of the state debt and the ignoring of national obligations. The second plan also meant a positive first step toward disunion, although the fact may not have been at first widely appreciated.

The particular difference between the two proposals which excited the citizens of Connecticut, however, was less momentous. The first favored the officers and men of the Revolutionary army who held commutation certificates—the most depreciated form of Continental securities—and who might be expected to profit more than the holders of Connecticut paper by the acceptance of their securities at face value. The second gave the advantage to the state militia and in effect excluded the members of the Continental Army from participation in the speculative profits of their patriotism. Since Connecticut had paid its own militia longer than any of the other warring colonies, the amount of state paper in circulation was large, and the division of economic interests within the state was correspondingly acute. Yet it cannot be really determined to what extent differences of opinion concerning the disposal of the Ohio lands were affected by financial self-interest and to what extent they were caused by an appreciation of the larger implications of the two plans. The men who had acquired a more or less national point of view through associations in the Continental service stood to make a profit through the sort of land sale that would promote national unity, whereas the neighborhood-minded militia would find it profitable to repudiate national obligations. Patriotic vision, temperamental disposition, and economic self-interest were inextricably confused from the very beginning to such an extent that even the people concerned could not have given an accurate account of their primary motives. The dissension did not continue long enough to become really serious, for it was relieved, on the one hand, by the tendency of the Connecticut legislature toward the satisfaction of state interests and, on the other, by the formation of the Ohio Company with good prospects for obtaining fifty-cent land from Congress. But in the meantime the land-conscious citizens were divided into two camps that eyed each other with mutual suspicion; and differences growing out of a temporary condition were to be sustained on other grounds.

Such was the situation during the summer when notices appeared in the Connecticut newspapers requesting a full attendance of the Society of the Cincinnati at the regular September meeting. The organization was composed of officers in the regular army of the Revolution; its members held quantities of commutation certificates; and a decision had been reached, in the first triennial meeting in 1784, that the state chapters would act together in exerting pressure upon Congress for an early grant of western lands. The Cincinnati were suspected because of their unity of interests and also because their original provision for a hereditary membership was taken by many people as an indication that they were trying to establish an order of nobility. Accordingly, the hint of an important meeting at this particular moment aroused suspicion among some of the land-conscious officers and men of the militia, as well as among citizens who had no military connection. Judge William Williams of Lebanon, the serious-minded, public-spirited son-in-law of the late Governor Trumbull, brooded over the situation and prepared an address in which he outlined the two plans for disposing of the lands and strongly supported the second. He sent a copy to Joseph Hopkins, of Waterbury, inclosed in a private letter that hinted at his fears of the Cincinnati and suggested the publication of the address before the regular county meetings of Freemen, which were scheduled for the same day as the meeting of the Society. The letter, however, was opened in transit, copied, and withheld from Hopkins until a few days before the scheduled meeting.

Judge Williams, who was in the embarrassing position of trying to prevent the uncertain actions of an organization in which his brother-in-law, Colonel John Trumbull, the painter, was secretary and an active member, had begged that his name be kept "impenetrably concealed"; but on October 9 the letter was published in the Connecticut Courant, in Hartford, followed by a burlesque version in octosyllabic couplets signed "William Wimble," in a thin disguise of the real author's name. The parody represented the letter-writer as comically self-important, mildly peccant, and suspicious of others from a consciousness of his own political chicanery. It also cast similar aspersions upon the recipient, whose identity was revealed by an allusion to the "copper-coining mint" that Joseph Hopkins had been operating in Waterbury up to the preceding June. The poem seems to have had no important purpose. Though it would inevitably sting so self-conscious a man as Williams and embarrass him in his personal relationships, it was probably no more than a slightly malicious warning for him to mind his own business—for he had guessed completely wrong concerning the reason for the special call to the Cincinnati. As a literary exercise it was clever and smooth, but notable primarily for its success in rhyming "to the rabble" and "impenetrable" and so copying, if not really rivaling, the "innumerable" and "consume-a-Rabble" standard of multiple rhymne which Swift had set for the octosyllabic couplet.

The New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Magazine immediately copied the letter and the parody, and, as innocuous as the latter was, it seems to have put ideas in the head of Josiah Meigs, the editor, who had been running a series of "Observations on the Present Situation and Future Prospects of This and the United States" under the signature of "Lycurgus." The series of ironical essays had pointed out the dangers of a federal government that had no power, made use of "Anarchus" in a pretended attack upon Washington and the late Governor Trumbull, and expressed an ironic preference for a poverty-stricken country over a prosperous one. The stand taken by Williams with regard to the Western Reserve was clearly opposed to the Federalist position supported by Meigs, and the Gazette quickly set out to destroy the political reputations of both Williams and the sympathetic Hopkins, who was nicknamed "Joseph Copper" in an effort to associate him with the idea of a depreciating currency—for Hopkins' coins had already begun to be held at less than face value. Accordingly, the next issue of the paper carried an alleged "answer" to Williams' letter, supposedly by Hopkins, and another burlesque in octosyllabics. The parody of the second letter—which Williams insisted was itself a forgery—was both less clever and more vicious than the poem of the previous week. It represented the author as a politician and a rogue whose cynical philosophy might be expressed briefly:

However the public's torn and tatter'd,
The people must be coax'd and flatter'd—
Their interest, sir, and ours, require it—
We'll ride this hobby till we tire it:
You know I've labor'd in this vineyard,
And led our chosen like a swine herd.

His confidant, by implication, was no better; and it was hinted that he would not be returned to the assembly after the spring session. The new poem had the air of a premeditated, purposeful attack; and, although lower in quality than the first, it contained one insidious phrase in "Copper's" defiance of "all the wicked wits" who had attacked him.

The first poem, which had given Williams the name "William Wimble," had done so with the purpose of associating him with the Will Wimble of the Spectator and so branding him as a trifler. The second, in making him—with Hopkins—a type of demagogue, was attacking him by associating his political activity with the mob rule that was beginning to fill the newspapers with dispatches from Massachusetts. For several years there had been sporadic outbursts of mob activity in the rural sections of New England, where the farmers were suffering from a post-war depression and the lack of currency; and by the late summer of 1786 the situation had grown critical. The state legislature of Massachusetts had adjourned without providing a hoped-for relief, with the result that popular conventions had been held in the western part of the state to demand unsecured paper currency and the restraint of legal actions against the debtors. As the autumn sessions of the courts of common pleas approached, with the usual crowded calendars of suits and the prospect of numerous imprisonments for debt, the people who had previously been excited by the Rev. Samuel Ely, of Hampshire County, rose as mobs and, on August 29, prevented the sitting of the court at Northampton. A week later the courts at Worcester were also closed by a mob. On September 12, Job Shattuck led another outbreak that closed the scheduled session of the court at Concord. Luke Day and Daniel Shays were the leaders of the western uprisings, and late in September they led their followers on Springfield in an effort to close the supreme judicial court from which they might receive indictments for their earlier activities. The militia was ordered out, and the court sat for three days but was forced to adjourn on September 28 without having transacted any business. By this time reports of the uprising were beginning to pour into the Connecticut newspapers, emphasizing the fears caused by earlier reports of the New Hampshire outbreak under Moses French; and when the "Joseph Copper" letter was published on October 23 the implication of demagogy and of an association with depreciating currency was a serious political charge

In the meantime, while the first news of the Massachusetts insurrections was appearing in the papers, Humphreys was in Hartford on a visit, between the September meeting of the Cincinnati and the October meeting of the general assembly, both of which he attended in New Haven. He was already viewing the situation with alarm in his "Mount Vernon: An Ode," which he published in the Courant for October 9, and he doubtless found his sentiments shared by most of his friends and associates. Dr. Hopkins had forcefully expressed his opinion of men whose fists were "clench'd to batter noses"; and a rising young lawyer like Barlow, no matter how he may have felt about Colonel Allen's activities in Pennsylvania, must have looked askance at the closing of courts so near by and the mobs' violent objections to the legal profession. At this time Barlow's efforts were frankly devoted to attaining "an interest," and he had not yet firmly established his humanitarian convictions. Accordingly, though he had opposed imprisonment for debt in his dissertation submitted for admission to the bar, he probably convinced himself that the law should be obeyed until it was changed—especially when he realized that his classmates, Noah Webster, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., and Josiah Meigs, and such prized friends as Dr. Hopkins, Trumbull, Humphreys, and Colonel Wadsworth were strongly of that opinion. There had never been any doubt concerning Trumbull's feeling about the checked-shirt-and-leather-apron men, even when he had been a patriotic poet writing about patriotic mobs, and M'Fingal had already been quoted in a Massachusetts newspaper against the insurrectionists.

It may have been while Humphreys was in Hartford that he discussed with his friends the possibility of some continuous satire directed against the conditions that threatened the American experiment in republican government. Colonel Wadsworth had been in England while a group of poets were causing much excitement with "The Rolliad" in the Morning Herald for 1784; and Humphreys had visited London while the same satire was still popular in book form and while sequels to it, by the same group of wits, were appearing periodically. Other members of the group may also have seen the publications, which professed to be criticisms of an ancient epic that foretold contemporary political developments, and Trumbull had already used the device of an ancient prophetic manuscript for purposes of satire in "The Correspondent." Dr. Hopkins had expressed, three years before, a sardonic conviction that the optimistic glimpses into the future presented by his friends in their commencement poems were altogether at variance with the real prospects; and he was doubtless ready to help them correct their youthful mistakes. Thus the minds of a group of accomplished versifiers were prepared for the idea of a satire based upon the "discovery" of an ancient prophetic manuscript; and, if Noah Webster had been riding his hobbyhorse of antique fortifications on the banks of the Muskingum during his June visits to Hartford, the location of the discovery had already been fixed in the Ohio country, in which some members of the group were actively interested at the time.

No single person need necessarily have been responsible, but somehow out of this ferment there arose a scheme for a series of satiric papers on American antiquities—critical observations on the Anarchiad: A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night, with extensive quotations from its twenty-four books. There was no novelty to Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow in the situation of "the prophetic bard," who seemed "to have taken for the point of vision one of the lofty mountains of America, and to have caused, by his magic invocations, the years of futurity to pass before him." But there was novelty in a vision of the rising glory of America that began "with unfolding the beautifying scenes when those plagues to society, law and justice, shall be done away with; when every one shall be independent of his neighbor; and when every rogue shall literally do what is right in his own eyes." The poets, who were still comparatively young men, were not profoundly disturbed; but the facile optimism of their earlier years had been displaced either by disillusionment or by less passive ideas of progress, and they began to affect pessimism in a literary effort to counteract the influences leading toward a social revolution unanticipated during the civil war against England.

If Humphreys took a fully matured proposal for the American Antiquities to New Haven when he and Wadsworth left to attend the general assembly, Josiah Meigs undoubtedly gave him enthusiastic encouragement; for the Lycurgus papers had been exhausted the preceding April and he had found no similar series that would take their place as featured satires directed against federal impotency, extreme democracy, state debt, and paper money. The first number appeared in the New Haven Gazette for October 26. It outlined the plan for the series by describing the supposed discovery and gave a brief sample of the Anarchiad in the form of heroic couplets presenting a vision of Massachusetts. The mobs of Day, Shays, and Shattuck had risen, the court had fallen as the frightened official ran to cover, and the constitution of Chaos had been restored as the "newborn state" was overwhelmed in the gulf of darkness. A week later the second number appeared with "a fragment of the speech which the old Anarch makes to Beelzebub, for the purpose of persuading him to come over and help his faithful friends in our Macedonia, since his affairs were in so thriving a posture in Massachusetts and Rhode Island." Like the Joseph Copper letter in the Courant, this was marked by bitter personal satire, with more than a dozen offensive allusions to individuals in less than twice as many couplets. Williams and Hopkins appeared again as "Wimble" and "Copper"; General James Wadsworth, of Durham, the state's leading advocate of a loose confederacy, was introduced under the name of "Wronghead"; Samuel Ely was referred to as "Froth, the sep'rate," glowing "with pop'lar rage"; Thomas Goodman, of New Hartford, was mentioned with him as a type of dotard from the lawless north; old Dr. Benjamin Gale, of Killingworth, received a sneering allusion; and a number of others were mentioned under aliases that can perhaps no longer be penetrated. They were all fairly prominent citizens of Connecticut—with the exception, perhaps, of Leonard Chester, who was satirized as "Laz'rus"—and all were identified as "Anarchists" by their opposition to the requisitions of Congress for the settlement of the national debt.

It was nearly two months before another number of American Antiquities appeared, but this issue had made it clear that a coordinated political attack was being organized by a group of men who made high-spirited references to themselves as "the wicked wits." Growing out of such a complexity of motives, the satires cannot be unmistakably attributed to particular authors. Unsympathetic contemporary opinion, as expressed by an anonymous poet in the Courant for November 20, held that it was "Hudy's great rival" (John Trumbull) who was "thrumming his lute." Humphreys wrote Washington, on November 16, that he, Trumbull, and Barlow were the authors of the papers. And a persistent tradition, beginning soon after the last of the group died, has insisted that Lemuel Hopkins was a prime mover in the business. Judge Williams, who was deeply hurt by the whole affair, publicly expressed the conviction, in October, that the Cincinnati were back of the attack upon him and that General Samuel H. Parsons, president of the Connecticut Society, had taken the lead in "employing a poet" to burlesque a letter dishonorably obtained. Parsons immediately denied the accusation with an irate honesty which the Wits soon indorsed by promoting and ridiculing a public quarrel between the two men. The Cincinnati were perhaps unofficially back of the William Wimble burlesque. They had been unjustly accused of scheming for preferential treatment in the Western Reserve (their special request for a full attendance having been made for entirely different reasons), and they had been subjected to so much criticism that they were highly sensitive; but the most likely instigator was Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth, vice-president of the Society, who was intimate with the entire body of Hartford versifiers. The poet was probably Trumbull. He was Wadsworth's close friend and a sort of unofficial adviser to the inner circles of the Cincinnati, and the original poem has all the stylistic marks of such burlesques as his "Epithalamium" and M'Fingal. Trumbull could hardly have written the Joseph Copper burlesque, however, unless he had suddenly lost the smoothness and facility that had characterized his use of the octosyllabic couplet during the previous seventeen years. Barlow, who was soon to become a shareholder in the Ohio Company and so had financial interests at stake, may have done it, either of his own accord or at the instigation of Meigs. The first number of American Antiquities was undoubtedly planned and probably written in conference by the authors mentioned by Humphreys—himself, Trumbull, and Barlow. The second could not have been prepared under such circumstances because the authors were separated by half the state. They may have followed the procedure adopted for the later Echo of sending the manuscripts around, when the authors were separated, for emendations and additions. The first paragraph of the prose criticism and some parts of the verse reveal a quality of phrasing that was characteristic of Hopkins alone among the members of the group, and the probability is that it was begun by Barlow and Hopkins working in collaboration, passed through Trumbull's hands, and was sent to Humphreys for final improvements and publication. Humphreys, who had spent only a few days in Hartford since Hopkins had moved there, could have had only a bare acquaintance with him and probably was unconscious of the physician's contribution. The intimacy of Trumbull, Barlow, and Hopkins was such that the latter was sure to have had a part in any literary activity that interested the other two and fitted his satiric temper; but the informal collaboration of a "friendly club" including Humphreys was physically impossible. In any event the activities of the wits became so complex that even their best friends were soon uncertain about what was going on; and, though Humphreys remained, perhaps, the guiding spirit of the American Antiquities, his associates became engaged in a high-spirited quizzing too subtle for his participation and too much like lese majesté for his approval.

This new development at first had no serious political purpose and apparently was the result of the temptation provided by an exchange of public letters between Williams and General Parsons. Late in October Williams had sent a brief note to the Connecticut Journal and New-Haven Post-Boy explaining the circumstances of the earlier letter, accusing General Parsons of being responsible for the burlesque, and insisting that the alleged reply from Hopkins had been a forgery. The Gazette reprinted this communication on November 2 with an aggressive reply from Parsons, in which he denied his responsibility for any of the actions of which he was accused. A week later, David Smith, one of the carriers of the letter, who had been charged with providing the Cincinnati with a copy, wrote in his own defense; and the same issue of the Gazette carried corrections by Williams designed to place the true contents of his first letter before the public. The tone of Parsons' letter and the agitation of Williams were an open invitation to the Wits, who undoubtedly were aware of the General's innocence; and they published, on the first page of the Gazette for November 23, another octosyllabic burlesque signed "Trustless Fox," with a postscript to the effect that it might have been signed "great General P—rs—ns" were the other name not more suited to his "unbooted" character. The same issue also contained an ironic prose defense of Williams, signed "Benevolence, Jr.," which professed to support him against "the wicked wits and snarling critics" who had inconsistently tried to represent him as both a knave and a fool. The tenor of the "defense" was to show that Williams was the latter, though the author refused to venture his own opinion of the appropriateness of the nickname; and it concluded on a note of sympathy "that an honest man should be a little disturbed, when so many wicked and malicious heads should be jumbled in HOTCHPOT to deprive him of his good character and office."

Benevolence, Jr., closed with a political hint which was fully developed when the Wits returned to the attack in the Gazette for December 14 in an ironically fatherly letter by "Benevolence, Sr." The supposition that Williams would lose his place in the next election was emphasized; and the author advanced the opinion, with ironic regretfulness, that "nothing could have been more opportunely, more happily, and more effectually calculated, than your essay, to fix indelibly the nickname 'William Wimble' upon Mr. Williams, and to exclude him from a seat in the upper house." Every implication contained in the letter by Benevolence, Jr., was made clear by the supposed father's attempt to warn him against "the wicked wits who are already sufficiently formidable to some of the grave pillars of our state." The letter concluded with a veiled hint that Benevolence, Jr., was the disliked "Laz'rus" of the Anarchiad and so gave a starting-point for "Anonimous," who contributed another letter, in the December 21 issue of the Gazette, addressed to Benevolence, Jr., or "Grey Goose the Younger." This letter developed the theme that "as Don Quixote had his Sancho Panca, Hudibras his Ralpho and M'Fingal his Constable, so hath William Wimble been accompanied to combat by his trusty squire Benevolence Jun." Anonimous was somewhat ironic about General Parsons; but his main effort was directed toward representing Williams as both a fool and a knave, for he not only associated him with the burlesque heroes of literature but accused him, in a bit of verse later included in the eighth number of American Antiquities, of leaguing with Joe Copper for the purpose of buying votes.

While the wicked Wits were carrying on at Hartford—probably under the direction of Trumbull, who had been well trained in this sort of darting, ingenious attack—Humphreys was active in other things. He had been appointed by the assembly on October 20 to raise a regiment of Connecticut militia for defense against a possible Indian uprising along the border, and he was busy making plans for recruiting and carrying out his legislative duties. He also took occasion to place his name before the public in a literary way. He arranged the series of documents which he published with an introduction, in the Gazette for November 16, as "The Conduct of General Washington, Respecting the Confinement of Capt. Asgill, Placed in Its True Point of Light"; and he also reprinted in the same issue his "Mount Vernon: An Ode," which had been originally published in the Courant five weeks before. Although the ode was pessimistic about existing conditions, it concluded with an optimistic belief that Providence would not leave "imperfectly achiev'd" the task begun in America. The Gazette for November 9 and December 7 also carried extracts from A Poem on the Happiness of America. The latter selection was accompanied by an introductory note in which the editors explained that it was printed in an effort "to put their Readers in better temper with respect to themselves, their neighbours, the community at large, and their fellow creatures in general"; and the reprinting of these pieces—which was almost certainly done with Humphreys' approval—would seem to indicate that the poet might be using his old optimism to cover his retreat from satiric activity. The concluding sentence of the editor's note approved the activities of the Wits, however, in a declaration that it was an effort "not less worthy of patriotic genius" to demonstrate to one's fellow-citizens "that the perverse disposition which induces them to spurn at greater privileges and blessings than are bestowed on any other nation, is madness to themselves, injustice to posterity, and the blackest ingratitude to heaven." Meigs had no intention of talking his prize satirist out of making new contributions.

Humphreys himself, as he indicated in his letters to Washington, was too firmly convinced that the antifederal and paper-money men were all demagogues and evil characters to give up his role as savior of his country. By the latter part of December he had rounded up the wicked Wits of Hartford and brought them back into the marked-out path of American Antiquities. The third number appeared in the Gazette for December 28, fulfilling the promise made in each of the earlier issues to present a selection from the epic episode dealing with Rhode Island. The paper-money party had come into power in that state during the spring elections, choosing John Collins as governor and Daniel Owen as lieutenant-governor, and their large issue of paper had immediately been subject to an enormous depreciation. An enforcing act had been passed requiring that the new currency be accepted at face value and providing that debts might be paid—if the creditor refused the legal tender—by depositing the requisite amount with the local court and advertising the fact in the newspapers. The neighboring states were full of such stories as that of the Connecticut man who inadvertently drove a load of wood over the Rhode Island line and was forced to sell it for worthless paper. The enforcing act had already been brought before the state court, and, though it had been vigorously supported by Henry Goodwin, a Newport attorney, it had been declared unconstitutional in September. But in spite of this legal doubt cast on the efficacy of paper money in Rhode Island and the fact that a paper-money proposal had already been easily defeated in the Connecticut legislature, the satirists launched a bitter personal attack upon Collins, Owen, and Goodwin (who was charged with writing the governor's speeches) and upon the Sodom-like "Island" of unrighteous rogues. "For it will scarcely be denied, in any part of the United States," they explained, "that paper money, in an unfunded and depreciating condition, is happily calculated to introduce the long expected scenes of misrule, dishonesty, and perdition."

When the time came around for the annual New Year's verses for the carriers of the Hartford papers, the local Wits took a holiday from the purposeful satire which Humphreys was fathering. Their masterpiece was the two-poem broadside for the Connecticut Courant. The first poem was a burlesque "Eclogue," consisting mostly of a dialogue between Ira Jones and Tertius Dunning, carriers of the Courant and the Mercury. The two boys professed to have received their respective verses from "a Bard sublime," who was given to rhymed compliments and from "the wittiest Bard in Town"; Tertius claimed only that he sang the news dealt out to man by Jove's own Mercury, and Ira that he was inspired by "the Politics of these intriguing Days." Both took liberties with the Connecticut poets. Tertius begged:

Inspire me, Phoebus! in my Wimble's praise,
With Humphreys' strains, and Barlow's moving lays;
No more his Plots reveal'd should he deplore,
And wicked Wits should versify no more;

while Ira wished:

Oh, in our Poet's Corner could I write
As Trumbull witty, and sublime as Dwight;
Copper should brighten in the polish'd strain,
And trustless Foxes seek their Holes again.

They glanced at the Rhode Island paper money, the New York impost, and the Massachusetts mobs; and, when they were stopped by the printer, they had begun to query each other about the authors of the Anarchiad and about how a republican government might exist without power. The poem was a good-humored piece of nonsense and was immediately ridiculed in the accompanying "The News-Boy's Apology for the Foregoing Verses. Written by Himself." In the "Apology" Ira complained that he had given one of the poets five shillings for the "confounded Eclogue" and had been able to get neither his money back nor another poem. He had protested that he had never talked in such a way to Tertius and, that point of view having made no impression on the poet, had objected to the political allusions:

So I told him flat and plain I thought 'twas quite improper,
To say any thing in New-Year's Verses about Wimble and Joe Copper;
And besides it was not politic, for all these Jokes so tickle us,
It made them Folks important instead of being ridiculous,
And when you keep pelting at 'em, and trying to be so witty,
Their Friends will stick to 'em like sheep-ticks and vote for 'em out of pity.
And I told him as to Shaise and all his Fraternity,
I didn't care if they got in a Snow-Drift and stay'd there to all Eternity.
And as to Paper Money, now Cash they say so scarce is,
I don't care a farthing about it, if they won't tender it to me for my Verses.
For my Master-Printers and I, satisfied with our Conditions,
Don't mean to torment ourselves by turning great Politicians,
We are all true-born Yankies, to our Country firm and hearty,
And join of your Factions, but print for every Party.

That argument did not work, either, and though Ira concluded by talking "to him out of the Decalogue" the only satisfaction he could get was that the poet had the money and he "must take the Eclogue." Accordingly, he could only apologize and suggest that he be paid double because of all his difficulties.

The comic "Eclogue" and the "Apology" (which was modeled after Swift's poetic representation of Mrs. Harris' petition "To Their Excellencies the Lord Justices of Ireland") were reprinted in the Gazette for January 11; and two weeks later the same paper published the New Year's verses from the Mercury, introduced by a note from the Massachusetts Centinel, which claimed that "Pegassus is not perhaps back'd by better Horseman from any part of the Union, than he is by those from the State of Connecticut." The "poetic Horsemanship" used to illustrate the claim consisted of octosyllabics based on the conceit of a chain of being extending from Jove's great toe to the earth; but, in spite of the insistence attributed to the carrier in the "Eclogue" that he sang only the news, the poem contained a light political satire more pointed than anything found in earlier Mercury verses for the New Year. In the meantime, other self-elected "wits" were trying to join in the chorus of verse. The Gazette for January 18 contained an announcement that the editors had recently "received a piece entitled American Antiquities No. 3" but that it was "evidently a spurious production" and so had not been printed, because "when any one assumes to write under a particular title, we think he ought not to be interfered with." Some verse "Advice to the Wits and Poets" adapted to "the Latitude and Longitude of Connecticut" appeared a week later, urging the Wits to let Wimble, Wronghead, and Copper alone and direct their attentions toward "the Spectator" who had undertaken to defend the actions of the legislature against the sensitive federalism of "Cato." A professed admirer of the American Antiquities offered "The Soliloquy of the Spectator" in satiric blank verse, for February 1, from a manuscript of tragedies recently discovered in Kentucky. A "Female Patriot" took her pen in hand two weeks later to speak while Anarch slept. The Courant, also, accepted contributions from outside the circle of "wicked wits"; and even the issue of February 26, which omitted all advertisements because the paper was so full of insurrection news, found room for "A Song" beginning "Come, come my bold boxers, 'tis Liberty calls," satirizing the "Tag, Rag, and Bobtail" mobs.

The inner circle of Wits, however, kept to their regular plan and on January 11 published their most ambitious selection from the Anarchiad in the form of preliminary speeches by Anarch and Hesper before their epic battle. Anarch contrasted the gold-respecting, patriotic British to the paper-money hypocrites in America; found evidence of his existing reign in the boldness of Shays and the insurrectionists, the Barbary corsairs, and the border Indians; and saw the "ghost of empire" stalking "without a head" in America. He also found encouragement in the retirement of Washington and the recent death of Greene, though he professed to fear that the time would come when there would be a reaction from mobs to monarchy. Hesper, in his turn, attacked Aedanus Burke for his pamphlet against the Cincinnati, prophesied a bad end for Shays, and called on new Greenes and Washingtons to rise. The selection broke off as they rushed to combat, but the paper closed with a note of optimism in a "conjecture that the combat ended with some disadvantage to old Anarch." There was, in fact, reason for the optimism, for the newspapers had already reported the successful outcome of Colonel Hichborn's campaign against the Middlesex mob and the capture of Shattuck, Parker, and Page; and the suppression of the insurrection in Vermont had been announced. When Humphreys' "The Genius of America: A Song" appeared as a supplementary manuscript to the Anarchiad for the fifth number of American Antiquities, on January 25, 1787, the author could only call for peace without venturing a prophecy of the outcome, which he still felt to be concealed in "shades of night." Yet on that very day General Lincoln met and permanently dispersed Shays' mob, bringing the insurrection to an end as far as the Wits were concerned, except for an aftermath of dispatches and the February tour of Humphreys' Connecticut regiments through the scenes of January excitement.

By February the Wits were convinced of the necessity of a formal attempt at a stronger federal union; and, with the dying-out of the excitement over regulators in the west and paper money in the east, they were free from emotional compulsion to slash out at their neighbors and so could direct their satire toward some constructive end. Their first campaign was to destroy the political influence of General James Wadsworth, leader of the anti-Federalist forces in the Upper House, whom they had already introduced into their papers as "Wronghead." On February 22 they presented his soliloquy, representing him as railing against Congress, courts, legal powers, trade, great men, and lawyers in "cant pretense of Liberty", enjoying the salaries of his many offices; selfishly scheming for the destruction of the Union in order to preserve his own position; and fearing the military forces authorized to "awe each mob, and execute the laws." Anarch, invoked by his fears, warned him that the greatest threat against him came not from force but from the free appeal to reason and that his plans would never succeed until reading and writing were practically eliminated, the press restrained, and the Wits hanged. On March 15 they returned to the attack even more directly and unmistakably. Wadsworth was presiding justice of the New Haven County Court of Common Pleas, a delegate to the Continental Congress, member of the Executive Council of Connecticut, comptroller of the state, and registrar or town clerk of Durham, as well as a former major general of the militia. They taunted him with being a "milleped of office" drawing a salary for every position, accused him of cowardice at the time of Tryon's first invasion of the state, denounced him for opposing the requisitions of Congress and the state and impost taxes recommended by the federal body, charged him with trying to protect the state from commerce by isolating it from the others, and laughed at him for joining with Wimble to save the people from the fancied machinations of the Cincinnati. And in conclusion they wished that he might "in brighter reagions burn" as a "glowing seraph" after death.

The Wits were also after their original butt, Judge Williams. While in Hartford during February, recruiting his regiment of militia for service on the border, Humphreys took time to write a fable on "The Monkey Who Shaved Himself and His Friends," which was "Addressed to the Hon. William Wimble" and published in the Courant for February 26. According to the story, the monkey (who represented Williams) was wonderful at imitating his master, a York barber (presumably Governor George Clinton, against whom Federalist activity was being organized); and, after frightening his friends by his efforts to shave them, he lathered himself and—in a couplet contributed by Trumbull:

Drew razor swift as he could pull it,
And cut, from ear to ear, his gullet.

The renewal of the attack on Williams was stimulated by a continuation of his quarrel with General Parsons, with whom Humphreys was closely associated as an active member of the Cincinnati. During the unusually cold month of December, Williams had adjourned the Windham County Court and had immediately been charged with being under the influence of the Massachusetts mobs. He had defended himself in the New London Gazette by a letter which was reprinted in the Courant for January 1. Parsons had published satiric comments on his defense three weeks later, and on February 19 Williams lost patience and responded with a severe personal attack upon Parsons. Humphreys' poem was designed to suppress Williams by making him lose confidence in his literary ability, and the "Moral" of his fable was specific:

Who cannot write, yet handle pens,
Are apt to hurt themselves and friends.
Though others use them well, yet fools
Should never meddle with edge tools.

As the spring elections approached, however, it became apparent that Williams had hurt himself little, if at all, by his communications to the papers, and there were whispers of plans to make him lieutenant-governor instead of Oliver Wolcott. The Wits, accordingly, set out to hang him, bury him, and pronounce "An Elegy on a Patriot" over his grave. The ballad elegy, which was supposedly taken from an ancient Ohio newspaper, appeared as the eighth number of American Antiquities on March 22; and on April 3, General Parsons published in the Courant a bad-humored prose attack on Williams. But neither served its purpose. In the May elections Williams received the third highest vote for membership on the governor's council; and within a year, as a member of the convention for considering the new federal constitution, he surprised his enemies by voting for its ratification. Hopkins, also included in the attack, was re-elected to office and eventually gave his approval to the plan of union. And James Hillhouse, who was satirized as the "Sachem of Muskingum," was chosen delegate to the Continental Congress, though he refused to attend. Humphreys had sent some of the American Antiquities to Washington with the comment that "pointed ridicule is found to be of more efficacy than serious argumentation"; and he informed his chief, in a letter of March 24, that the Connecticut assembly was under the influence of a few "miserable, narrow minded and… wicked Politicians." But he was wrong in each observation. The Wits accomplished no measurable results by their satire; and in several cases they failed to estimate correctly the men they were opposing, with the result that they spent a good part of their energy denouncing enemies who existed solely in their imagination.

It may be that most of them had no really serious political purpose anyway; for, instead of pushing their attacks upon Connecticut politicians up to the eve of the May elections, they turned their eyes to New York. Stephen Mix Mitchell, a delegate to the federal Congress, had written Jeremiah Wadsworth in January that "the Anarchiad, book 23d is read here, with much pleasure and obtains applause"; he had added that it was "judged to be a meritorious performance." The authors, who were having the satisfaction of finding the papers generally "reprinted in more papers and read with greater avidity than any other performances," were particularly pleased with their new audience. Accordingly, they prepared another selection from the twenty-third book for the benefit of their New York admirers and published it on April 5. Representing the soliloquy of Anarch after having been vanquished by Hesper, and the consolations of his mother Night, this ninth number emphasized New York's rejection of Congress' request for a federal impost and satirized the antifederal leaders in that state. Governor Clinton was attacked as an "illustrious changeling," who had begun to "court the low crowd"; Samuel Jones was satirized for his personal appearance, for his legal activities within the British lines during the Revolution, and for his antifederal leadership in the state legislature; and another of Clinton's followers was represented as "blind Belisarius," full of fantastic fears of congressional power. All these satiric portraits were personal and offensive, though the characters were perhaps sufficiently concealed to be recognized only by the initiate. But the Wits were most brutal and clearly outspoken in their attack upon Abraham Yates, author of some of the "Rough-Hewer" essays and New York delegate to the Congress, who was considered by some members the man of least understanding in the federal body because of his constant and undeviating opposition to anything that looked toward a closer union. This selection of the Anarchiad was undoubtedly composed for the amusement of those members of Congress who were already fixed in their political beliefs rather than for the purpose of influencing the public. But young Alexander Hamilton was credited by name with a brilliant speech in the New York legislature favoring the impost; and his failure to carry his point was explained by satiric reference to the "band of mutes," who, according to a New York wit, had strangled the measure by voting against it without making any attempt to answer Hamilton. The theme of the entire piece was that, though Anarch had been vanquished by Hesper, mother Night still had dreams of establishing her realm with the assistance of the new leaders that were springing up in New York.

The tenth number of American Antiquities, published on May 24, was not satiric at all. The constitutional convention had just begun its meetings in Philadelphia, and Hesper, in the concluding book of the Anarchiad, was represented as addressing the assembled sages in the interest of union. The heroes who had fallen on the battlefields of the Revolution were celebrated, the dangers of faction and of irresponsible rule were pointed out, and the patriotism of the federal leaders was praised. Anti-Federalists were warned that disorder would inevitably lead to monarchy; and the point was made that a loose confederation of states, forming a restless government by factious crowds, going from one extreme to another, would be just as bad. The sons of freedom who had settled in America, however, did not have to choose necessarily between license and despotism. They had resigned enough of their power and natural rights to form social leagues, and from ancient habit they obeyed the local powers. But their establishments had not taught them reverence for a general government, nor had it given them an interest in the federal welfare. The point at issue, therefore, was not the fundamental principle of union but the practical expedients of standing against foreign foes, regulating finance, and controlling trade. Yet action was necessary, for the country had reached the point where it would have to take seriously the warning "Ye Live United, or Divided Die!"

The concluding numbers of the American Antiquities made an anticlimax. Publishing their observations on August 16 and September 13, while the constitutional convention was meeting in Philadelphia, the Wits had nothing further to say in the interest of union and no ideas to contribute toward the solution of practical problems. Instead, they went back to the seventeenth book of the Anarchiad in order to represent "the land of annihilation" and "the region of pre-existent spirits," in which the politicians satirized in the earlier numbers and the writers critical of America and American institutions passed in review. The Abbe Raynal, the Count de Buffon, and the Abbe de Pau were denounced for their derogatory comments on American genius and the American climate and soil; Dr. Robertson was satirized for echoing their opinions; and Robert Morris was intemperately condemned as a worshiper of Mammon because he had publicly indorsed Raynal's statement concerning the absence of literary genius in America. Aedanus Burke was again attacked for his pamphlet against the Cincinnati, Demeunier for borrowing an account from him for the Encyclopédie méthodique, and Mirabeau and Linguet for their writings against the society. Significantly, however, Jefferson was not mentioned. Humphreys thought and had informed Washington that the foreign minister and not Burke was the source of the article against the Cincinnati in the Encyclopédie, but it may have been that he felt it wise to refrain from satirizing a man from whom he might expect further employment in a public capacity. The last group to pass in satiric review were the imaginative writers on American history and politics—the Abbe Mably, Target, D'Auberteul, and even the Rev. Samuel Peters, "the fag-end man of M'Fingal," who had published his libelous history of Connecticut from the safety of London five years before. Such satire at that time, however, was rather pointless, and the Wits seem to have engaged in it only because they hated to give up a series of literary productions that had been so spontaneously popular. It was not until February 21, 1788, that they brought the series to a definite close, allowing Anarch to bury all his followers and issue an "Edict of Penance."

When the Philadelphia convention presented a definite plan of union in the form of a constitution, the Wits had nothing to say. As a group they kept completely silent during the controversy over its adoption. The New Year's verse of the Hartford Courant for 1788 dealt with "The Forc'd Alliance" in the form of "A Dialogue" between two patriots, Wronghead (General James Wadsworth) and Lamb (John Lamb, collector of customs at New York), in which the Constitution was discussed. The author—probably Lemuel Hopkins—considered the approval a foregone conclusion and had Wronghead regret that Connecticut could not be surrounded by a wall of brass which would protect the blue laws, the rude living conditions, and the "equal poverty" of the old days of dependence upon the "hard-bound soil." Lamb, for his part, praised the imperial position of New York, with a state impost forcing tribute from the sister-states; expressed confidence in the efforts of Clinton, Jones, and Yates to protect the state against outside influences; and found encouragement in the "trite objections" to the Constitution made by Gerry, Mason, Lee, and other "scribblers." Thus opposition to the new plan of union was branded as the result of ignorant conservatism and contemptible self-interest; but there was no concerted action even to influence the Connecticut convention which was to meet in January. Humphreys, whose ambition had probably kept the Wits together as a more or less unified group, had gone to spend the winter with Washington at Mount Vernon; and even before he left he had turned his mind to the idea of gaining fame through the medium of the drama. The literary possibilities of the Anarchiad had been exhausted just as it had begun to have some large political significance.

The Wits themselves had applied the term "hotchpot" to their activities, and they perhaps could have selected no better. The motives that lay back of their writings were certainly complex and varied. Barlow and possibly Trumbull had some speculative interest in the disposal of western lands; and Humphreys, as a former army officer, may also have retained commutation certificates that gave him some concern in the matter. Trumbull and Hopkins both had a deeply rooted antagonism to mobs and the irrational activities of the crowd. Humphreys and Barlow were members of the Society of Cincinnati, Trumbull had been closely associated with the organization since its first general meeting, and all were sensitive to the criticism—much of it unfair—to which the Society had been subjected. Trumbull and Barlow were lawyers at a time when the people were closing courts, disrupting legal procedure, and promising violence to lawyers; and naturally they saw their livelihood threatened. None of them owned any considerable amount of real property, the economic welfare of those who resided in Hartford was dependent upon the growth of manufacturing and trade, and all were peculiarly vulnerable to the dangers of paper money. They were men of better education, wider experience, and broader vision than the average citizen; and their friends—particularly Humphreys'—were men whose horizons extended far beyond Connecticut. In addition, Hopkins and Trumbull were high-spirited men with a peculiar talent for satiric writing and an unquestioning belief that the rod was proper to a fool's back; Humphreys had a solemn conviction that he should benefit his country with his pen as well as with his sword; and Barlow was sufficiently adjustable, high-spirited, and ambitious to keep on good terms with them all. Living in a land of steady habits from which the wilder spirits had already emigrated, a state which had remained unaffected by the new fashions for constitutions and so had kept the lower classes safely disenfranchised, the Wits had to look beyond their borders for political bugbears or else create them out of their own imaginations. Accordingly, they had never been welded into a close group by the heat of any real passion of fear or belief. They were held together by literary success and the accidental similarity of their wayward impulses; and, when they lost the stimulation of their first objects of satire and worked their literary design up to a climax, the political job which remained to be done had no great appeal for them, even though they had finally achieved some unity of belief and purpose.

The superiority of their literary ambitions over their political inspiration was revealed by the growing plan of their burlesque in comparison with the continued "hotchpot" of their satire. The design of the American Antiquities was suggested by the Rolliad papers; but the poets attempted humorous effects by calling to their readers' minds, by allusion and parody, more familiar poetry than that written by the Rolliad group. At first, though the authors suggested that they might show, in a future essay, that Homer, Virgil, and Milton had borrowed "many of their capital beauties" from the Anarchiad, they contented themselves entirely with a parody of Pope. The subtitle describing their work as "A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night" was, of course, suggested by the Dunciad; and a considerable section of the first two numbers was nothing more than a re-wording of the vision in the third book of Pope's poem. The picture of Rhode Island in the third number probably owed something to the English poet's representation of England in the same vision, but the borrowing was less definite; and in the fourth number the Essay on Man was also called upon for a contribution. In addition, Humphreys had paid his own Poem on the Happiness of America the tribute of parody in the second number. It was not until the poets had reached Number VI that they began to give their selections a definite place in the epic from which they were supposedly quoting (though they had previously used the Homeric and Miltonic councils of war and lists of heroes); but with the citation of particular books they also began to take on a more positive epic manner, and the "dark world" invoked by Wronghead was that revealed by Sin when she opened Hell-gate in the second book of Paradise Lost. The next selection returned to the heroic games of an earlier part of the imaginary epic, and again the poets drew on the Dunciad for the opening lines. The soliloquy and consolation of Anarch after having been vanquished by Hesper—a conventional bit of epic action—was based upon Milton; and the advice of Hesper to the assembled sages, supposedly taken from the concluding book of the Anarchiad, was structurally characteristic of the moral epic from Paradise Lost to The Vision of Columbus. When the poets tried to carry on their work after the climax of Hesper's address, they leaned heavily on literary precedent for their representation of the lower world, citing in their critical notes Homer, Virgil, Milton, "the Gothic bards," Tasso, Ossian, and Dante; and the poem concluded with an imitation of Pope's versification, in the Messiah, of the prophetic passages of Isaiah. Throughout there was a good deal of additional literary allusiveness (including one couplet borrowed from Churchill's Rosciad), echoes of Virgil, Homer, and even The Conquest of Candan. Barlow and Humphreys frequently imitated their own serious works, perhaps both consciously and inadvertently; the selections contained a number of allusions to and verbal echoes of M'Fingal; and on one occasion, in the fourth number, Hopkins used phrases and ideas that he later developed into an independent poem. In general, the history of the Anarchiad was like that of M'Fingal; it began as a rather haphazard political satire, containing a large element of simple parody, and it grew into a literary burlesque to which the satire was subordinate, at least in the minds of the authors. As in the case of M Fingal, too, the tradition of its political effectiveness seems to be mostly a myth.

The significance of the American Antiquities series lies in the fact that it illustrates how easily even such serious poets as Barlow and Humphreys could be diverted from their chosen "road to fame" into a superficial "hotchpot" of satire and how trivial and literary their interests remained in the face of momentous political changes. All four of the authors were comparatively young men, and men of some vision; naturally they were inclined to be impatient with such older conservatives as William Williams and James Wadsworth and to be sympathetic toward the experimental proposal for a closer union under a strong general government. Yet they were led by the example of the Dunciad to waste their energies with ineffectual attacks upon harmless individuals, condemning mobs and paper-money movements on grounds already discounted by the participants, and, in general, climbing on the bandwagon of public opinion instead of trying to lead it. As the issue of federalism gradually became clarified for them, they did take sides and try to be of some practical political use; but when the issue became acute they quit writing. It was not because they failed to appreciate the situation: Barlow, in a Fourth of July address before the Society of Cincinnati in 1787, devoted a large part of his speech to the constitutional convention and concluded:

Every possible encouragement for great and generous exertions, is now presented before us. Under the idea of a permanent and happy government, every point of view, in which the future situation of America can be placed, fills the mind with a peculiar dignity, and opens an unbounded field of thought. The natural resources of the country are inconceivably various and great; the enterprising genius of the people promises a most rapid improvement in all the arts that embelish human nature; the blessings of a rational government will invite emigrations from the rest of the world, and fill the empire with the worthiest and happiest of mankind; while the example of political wisdom and felicity here to be displayed will excite emulation through the kingdoms of the earth, and meliorate the conditions of the human race.

This sort of oratorical optimism and broad point of view—like the cheerful belief expressed in the same address that "the majority of a great people, on a subject which they understand, will never act wrong"—was much more characteristic of Barlow and of Humphreys than the irresponsible wit of the American Antiquities. But these two poets, who might have been expected to guide the series safely past trivialities, were hagridden by self-consciousness and awareness of precedents; and they seem never to have realized that a writer might adopt a literary form and then so completely lose himself in it that he could devote his entire energies to some serious purpose. As concerned as they were with literature, they were in an environment in which spontaneous energy expressed itself in other ways, and they never escaped from a basic assumption that poetry was not quite real—that polite literature, like polite behavior, was a cultivated affectation.

For two of the wicked Wits the Hartford episode was a halfway point in careers that were to take new directions toward more varied activities in a wider world. For the other two it was a dead end. Lemuel Hopkins, to whom verse was never more than a social activity or a relief from occasional irritation, continued to write in the peculiarly caustic vein that makes his work the most distinctive of the group. A new body of wits grew up: Theodore Dwight, the younger brother of Timothy, who was later to become a distinguished newspaper editor; Richard Alsop, a remarkably well-read young man from Middletown, who was talented enough to become a fine poet had he been willing to devote himself wholeheartedly to the art; Elihu H. Smith, a young physician from Litchfield with unusual literary ambitions, who was to die of yellow fever before he fully revealed his independence of mind; Mason W. Cogswell, another young physician, who was too modest about his literary ability to co-operate fully with the others, although he wrote copiously in secret; and Nathaniel Dwight, another of Timothy's younger brothers, who occasionally contributed bits to the collaborated efforts of the others. Hopkins joined them and guided their efforts. They began The Echo, which reversed the line of development of the American Antiquities by starting as literary burlesque in the American Mercury for August 8, 1791, turning to political and personal satire, and finally going to pieces in a "hotchpot" of New Year's verse and individual satires. The Courant offered a rival burlesque, "The Versifier" (probably by Cogswell), for a short while in 1793; but when The Echo became politically embarrassing to the democratic Mercury, the Federalist Courant took it over and perhaps made Elisha Babcock regret that he had ever encouraged such irritating young men.

Hopkins, who was always loyal to his friends no matter how he may have reprobated their opinions, spent some years in indifference but apparently wrote the New Year's verses for the Mercury in 1793 and 1794. As he became aroused by French machinations and the activities of southern politicians, however, he came to feel more at home in the Courant, into which he moved in January, 1795, followed by The Echo upon its next appearance in August. There he began, in 1796, "The Guillotina," an annual post-boy's satire as sharp as its name, which he continued until his death. His most important single work, however, was an attack upon medical quackery, aroused by the "metallic points to relieve pain," patented by Dr. Elisha Perkins in February, 1796. These "tractors," designed to cure disease by the "electrical fluid" of galvanism, marked the high point of charlatanism in Connecticut medical history; and, when a pamphlet of enthusiastic testimonials appeared in October, 1796, Hopkins responded with a long satiric "Patent Address" in the Courant for November 7. Full of medical terminology but as biting as anything Hopkins had ever written, it probably had a good deal to do with encouraging the members of the state medical society to expel Perkins at their next spring meeting. Hopkins himself, during this time, was acquiring distinction as a physician and teacher of medicine and laying the foundation for lasting fame as a rival of Benjamin Rush in his treatments of consumption. His sudden death of pneumonia, on April 14, 1801, brought a close to the career of one of the few literary men of the time whose reputation for good sense and forthrightness was such that it could earn from an editor of opposite political views one simple comment: "He was an honest man."

Trumbull was less active in literature than Hopkins. Although he retained his sardonic attitude toward the world, even describing Washington as "all-fragrant with the odour of incense" during the first year of his presidency, he kept such comments for the ears and eyes of his friends and restrained himself in public. Political ambitions may have influenced his discretion, for after serving as one of the city fathers of Hartford he was appointed county attorney in 1789 and elected to the state legislature in 1792. But he probably shared Hopkins' indifference to politics during the first term of Washington's administration and found little in the affairs of the nation that could whip his indolent spirit into expression. In any case the state of his health induced more melancholia than satire. Hopkins was worried about both the health and the spirits of his friend during the summer of 1792 but reported that he was "much better" the following year. Trumbull himself showed sufficient signs of recovery in May, 1793, to compose a virulent attack in verse upon Pierrepont Edwards, which he perhaps recognized as the most vicious poem he had ever written and, consequently, did not publish. He was one of the managers of the lottery authorized for building the Hartford courthouse, in 1794, but he had to spend so much of his time traveling to various watering places for his health that he was despondent about his political prospects. Eventually, however, he recovered and in 1800 again went to the state legislature, from which he was elevated a year later into a judgeship on the superior bench. From that time on he "declined," as he said, "any interference in the politics of the state, and applied himself exclusively to the duties of his office—being of the opinion, that the character of a partizan and political writer was inconsistent with the station of a judge and destructive of the confidence of suitors in the impartiality of judiciary decisions." He was also made judge of the Supreme Court of Errors in 1808 and retained both offices until the spring of 1819, when the democrats finished taking over the state.

Unless Trumbull's character had changed greatly during these years, he must have had some difficulty in keeping his hand from the pen. His literary reputation had flourished during the nineties, when the Federalists found so many of the sentiments of M'Fingal useful to their own purposes; but the democrats had taken advantage of the situation by attributing to the author some of the most objectionable opinions of the Tory spokesman. Leonard Chester, in particular, took a belated revenge at his appearance in the Anarchiad by giving a cruel portrayal of Trumbull in Federalism Triumphant in the Steady Habits of Connecticut Alone, a political farce widely circulated by the democrats in 1802. In addition to representing Trumbull as M'Fingal himself in his more objectionable moments, Chester told a libelous story of an ingenious Federalist scheme to get the author into the legislature and thence on the bench: "Thode" Dwight had been sent around the country saying that Trumbull "had been in a state of intoxication for years" and was utterly worthless—which made the republicans heatedly insist that Trumbull's opinion drunk was better than Dwight's sober and so elect him. There was probably just enough truth in the suggestion of the poet's interest in the bottle to drive Trumbull to a fury. How the former "Correspondent" and author of the second part of The Progress of Dulness managed to remain quiet is a mystery, but he apparently stayed out of the Connecticut controversy although he made occasional surreptitious contributions to the New-England Palladium in Boston. The only literary work attributed to him during his years on the bench was a short Biographical Sketch of Governor Trumbull, published in 1809.

Yet Trumbull retained his interest in literature. He kept an approving eye upon the satires of The Echo poets and may have made occasional contributions to them. When the collection was published as a volume in 1807 he was able to annotate his copy and note the authorship of many individual pieces. He also kept up with the new poets of his time, making notes for critical essays or expressing opinions concerning modern literature in letters to his friends. He had always been interested in the art of poetry and particularly enthusiastic about the metrical variety Pope achieved within the bounds of the heroic couplet; and in a discussion of prosody for the second part of Noah Webster's Grammatical Institute of the English Language he had attempted to point out the possibilities of that measure. The new writers who seemed to depend upon novelty rather than craftsmanship for their effects had no charm for him. They were "discordant" and "unnatural," given to "confusion," "rant," and "eccentricity." He had no use for the "lullaby of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads" and none for Crabbe's The Borough or for Southey's Thalaba or The Curse of Kehama. As one who had been early taught by Lord Kames to prize the complete visual image, he saw Crabbe and Wordsworth "bathing in the muddy bottom of the streams of Helicon" and certainly would have found nothing more than pure confusion in the association of ideas that led away from the actual scene in "Tintern Abbey." Coleridge (and perhaps Southey as well) wrote "as though a poetical Bedlam was about to be erected on the summit of Parnassus." Thomas Moore, with a "poetic fire" that was "mostly phosphoric," delighted in "gaudy" images, painting similes when he should have been describing the object. Byron also failed to excel in description, specializing in passion and feeling "of the worst sort." As a moralist, Trumbull saw no excuse, in 1820, for "the voluptous licentiousness of T. Moore, the profligate buffonery of Peter Pindar, or the unprincipled spleen and misanthropy of Lord Byron." As an artist, he found fault, in 1814, with all blank vers—even that of the previously admired Milton. He did not approve, on any score, German ballads or Scottish imitations of them. Not one of the Connecticut Wits, as time went on, grew further out of touch with his age.

But Trumbull could not realize it. The substance of his irritability had produced a few poetic pearls, but most of it ultimately went into the shell that he built around himself for protection against the world. His friend Samuel G. Goodrich published his Poetical Works in two well-printed volumes in 1820 and lost a thousand dollars on the venture. The thousand dollars went to the poet as advance royalty, but he never fully believed that the sale of his works could barely pay the cost of printing and was never quite convinced that he had not been mistreated. He remained in Hartford until 1825, composing rather surprisingly mild and cheerful New Year's verse for the Courant in 1824, then joined his daughter in Detroit, where he lived the last six years of his life, dying on May 11, 1831, the longest lived of all the Wits, although he had been the first to give up the struggle for literary distinction.