SOURCE: An introduction to The Connecticut Wits. edited by Vernon Louis Parrington, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1926, pp. ix-xlvi.

[Parrington was an American historian, critic, and educator who contributed regularly to such prestigious reference works as Encyclopaedia Britannica and The Cambridge History of American Literature. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the first two volumes of his influential Main Currents in American Thought (1927); the third volume remained unfinished at the time of his death. In this series, Parrington composed, according to Michael O'Brien, "not a study of American literature so much as of American political thought refracted through literature." While his efforts are still widely admired today, many critics contend that his unabashedly liberal bias, and his summary judgments of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and others, compromised his work In the following introduction to his The Connecticut Wits (1926), Parrington assesses the contribution of the Wits, noting that, "though they fell short of their ambitious goal, their works remain extraordinarily interesting documents of a critical period. "]

For a good many years now the members of the literary coterie that forgathered in Hartford in the closing years of the eighteenth century, and proffered their wit and wisdom to all New England, have enjoyed such shadowy fame as comes from the reprinting of their names in successive school histories of our literature. Their several individualities have long since gone the way of mortality, but their composite reputation has been happily preserved by the salt of a phrase. Under the quaint title of the Connecticut or the Hartford Wits—a title which, to borrow Whitman's Gallicism, has proved to be their carte de visite to posterity—they are annually recalled by a considerable number of undergraduates on the eve of an examination; but what sort of men they were, and what they severally and jointly contributed to a little world sadly wanting sweetness and light, are questions about which no undergraduate ever concerns himself. Their works lie buried in old libraries with the dust of years upon them; their descriptive title alone dwells among the living. To rescue them if possible from the obscuring shadow of their collective reputation, to permit them once more to speak for themselves in their eighteenth century vernacular, is the purpose of this partial reprinting of their works. The record as they left it, very likely will not appeal to the taste of a far different age. We shall probably find their verse stilted and barren, and their robust prejudices hopelessly old-fashioned; but stilted and barren though their couplets may be, and extraordinary though their dogmatisms may seem to us, they throw a clear light on provincial New England in the acrid years of the seventeen-nineties, when America was angrily debating what path to follow in order to arrive at its predestined objective. The Hartford Wits may not deserve the high title of poets; they were smaller men than they esteemed each other and their generation rated them; but though they fell short of their ambitious goal, their works remain extraordinarily interesting documents of a critical period.

The title of the group sufficiently reveals their intellectual antecedents. That they alone amongst our early dabblers in verse succeeded in preempting the excellent name of Wits, suggests how late the spirit of eighteenth century English culture came to expression in America, and also how inadequately. That they were not alone in their efforts to shape American letters after the Augustan pattern, every student of our early verse knows. Others before them aspired to be Wits, and others after them. From Mather Byles to Robert Treat Paine the refinement of Pope and the trenchant severity of Churchill had been the admiration of American poetasters; but they alone achieved a measurable degree of success in domesticating the Wit ideals, and by their persistent labors in the field of satire they created for the first time in America what may be called a school of poetry. By the end of the century their reputation had spread well beyond the confines of New England, and when an ambitious collection of native verse was issued in New York in 1794, under the title of The Columbian Muse, the editor felt constrained to give up considerably more than half the total space to their work. Only Philadelphia could hope to enter into poetic rivalry with the Connecticut group. In the social and literary capital of America poetry was sedulously cultivated. Francis Hopkinson, an amiable dabbler in polite arts, had contributed a number of sprightly jeux d 'esprit; young William Cliffton was preparing to dedicate his short life to verse; and Peter Porcupine—the brutally caustic William Cobbett—was achieving a lively notoriety as a purveyor of virulent couplets. But the culture of Philadelphia was smutched by the strife of partisan rivals. Young enthusiasts for the rights of man gathered there—Philip Freneau from New Jersey, and idealists from overseas—to throw their literary brickbats at the spokesmen of conservatism. There was wanting the solidarity of polite opinion that gave a sanction of authority to upper-class Yankee views, and no school of poetry arose to enshrine in clever couplets the culture of a homogeneous society.

This is what lends its chief significance to the work of the Hartford group. They embodied a conception of life and society that had taken form during nearly two hundred years of provincial experience; and they phrased that conception at the moment when vast changes were impending and the traditional New England was on the point of being caught in the grasp of forces that were to destroy what was most native in her life. The "Wits" were the last representatives of a literary mode that had slowly percolated through the crust of Puritan provincialism and imparted a certain sprightliness to a dour temper. They were the literary old guard of eighteenth century Toryism, the expiring gasp of a rationalistic age, given to criticism, suspicious of all emotion, contemptuous of idealistic programs. But though they aspired to follow the latest London modes, they could not wholly lay aside congenital prejudices, and they unconsciously gave to the imported fashion a homely domestic cut. If they were Wits they were Yankee Wits, and their manners were formed in Connecticut rather than at St. James's, at Yale College rather than Brooks Club. They aspired to unite culture with godliness, and this Puritan predilection for righteousness adds a characteristic native savor to their wit.

Although their writing was done at a time when the romantic revolution, soon to set all western civilization in ferment, was well under way in France, and had already entered America, there is in them no suggestion of sympathy for the new ideas. As good Calvinists and honest men they would hold no commerce with "French infidel philosophy." They stood stoutly by the customary and familiar. The age was visibly falling to decay before their eyes, yet they set themselves with the fury of dogmatic conviction to new-prop an order that had contented their fathers. They were the self-satisfied embodiment of the outworn. The nineteenth century was knocking at their door, but they would not open to it. And as they saw that century coming in the guise of revolution, exciting to unheard-of innovations in the fields of politics and economics and religion and letters; as they observed it sweeping triumphantly through Virginia, turmoiling the pugnacious society of Philadelphia, expressing itself in the rebellious work of Philip Freneau and Tom Paine and Matthew Carey, in Jacobin Clubs and Jeffersonian democracy, they set themselves seriously to the work of barring its progress in their own little world. They conveniently associated the economic unrest of post-war days—that gave birth to a strange progeny in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and Massachusetts—with the contamination of French atheism, charged all unrest to the account of democracy, and hastened to put it down in the name of law and righteousness. They hated new ways with the virtuous hatred of the well-to-do, and piously dreamed of a future America as like the past as one generation of oysters is like another.

There is a certain historical fitness in the fact that the Wits should have arisen in Connecticut and been the intellectual and spiritual children of Yale. For generations the snug little commonwealth had been the home of a tenacious conservatism, that clung to old ways and guarded the institutions of the fathers with pious zeal. In no other New England state did the ruling hierarchy maintain so glacial a grip on society. The Revolution of '76 had only ruffled the surface of Connecticut life; it left the social structure quite unchanged. The church retained its unquestioned control of the machinery of the commonwealth; and the church was dominated by a clerical aristocracy, hand in glove with a mercantile aristocracy. The Connecticut yeomanry was extraordinarily docile, content to follow its traditional leaders with implicit faith in their godliness. Those leaders would have been scarcely human if they had not come to regard authority as an inalienable prerogative of their caste, and office-holding as a natural right. To seek to turn a gentleman out of a place to which he had once been chosen, was reckoned by them wickedly Jacobinical. A small interlocking directorate controlled religion, business, and politics. Church, state, and trade were managed by the same little group to the common end of keeping all poachers off their preserves. If politics centered about the church it was because the church was the particular guardian of politics. In self-defense "her preachers were politicians and her politicians preachers," to quote a recent historian [Purcell, Connecticut in Transition]. So narrowly oligarchical was the domination of this clerical-mercantile group of politicians, that a contemporary Republican described Connecticut as an "elective despotism or rather elective aristocracy"—a domination that was never seriously threatened till the revolution of 1818 finally unseated the old order. Other commonwealths might yield to the blandishments of the Jacobins, but so long as Timothy Dwight and Governor Trumbull lived Connecticut would keep to her ancient ways.

It was her aloofness more than anything else that held the little commonwealth back from the plunge into the maelstrom of nineteenth century change. Few immigrants came bringing different ideals; the yeomanry followed a familiar round of life; currents of thought that were stirring the pulpits of eastern Massachusetts—suggestions of Arianism that was to be the forerunner of a Unitarian movement destined to create a schism in the traditional church order—did not reach so far as New Haven, and the intellectual life of Connecticut was undisturbed by the inchoate liberalisms of pre-Revolutionary days. Year after year her brightest young men went up to Yale to be trained in the orthodox Calvinism, and departed thence to re-thresh the old straw in every steepled meeting-house in the commonwealth. Yale College was a very citadel of political and theological orthodoxy. It had been founded by devout Calvinists to offset the supposed defection of Harvard, and in the intervening years it had stood loyally to its purpose. No doubt Yale undergraduates were not always models of Calvinistic propriety—as Trumbull plainly suggests in The Progress of Dulness; certainly during the early days of the French Revolution many of them were polluted by French atheism; but with the coming of Timothy Dwight to the presidency, all such uncleanness was swept away, and Yale dutifully turned to the pious work of preserving the commonwealth from all democratic innovation. The clergy who gathered for Commencement welcomed the young recruits to their ranks, impressing upon them the sacredness of the existing order with which their lives were to be linked, and dilating upon the social responsibility devolving on the holder of a Yale degree. If every Yale graduate were not a sound Calvinist and a sound Federalist it was no fault of a school that removed an instructor for espousing the Republican faith.

The daily round of life in Connecticut centered in the church to a degree that a later generation has difficulty in comprehending. Society was strait-laced in rigid dogma, and because that dogma was built about the core of total depravity, it imparted a peculiarly unfortunate bias to everyday thought. It is unnecessary here to discuss the familiar five points of Calvinism, but the intimate relations between those doctrines and the social and political faith of Connecticut require a measure of consideration. The Wits were stanch old-school Calvinists, and the robust prejudices that impart to their pronouncement a more than Johnsonian dogmatism, were the sour fruit of their religious faith. It is too often overlooked that historically and practically the doctrine of total depravity, in its larger implications, was quite as much social and political as theological; that it emerged originally as a by-product of social caste and carries in its face the mark of aristocracy; and that it has everywhere been pressed into the service of social inequality. Endowed with high theological sanction, pronounced by the church to be the inscrutable decree of God, it is perhaps the most pernicious doctrine that western civilization has ever given birth to. But pernicious as it is, carrying over into eternity the caste divisions of temporal orders, it has proved too convenient a doctrine to be lightly surrendered by those who find it useful. It wove itself through the entire fabric of social thought in old Connecticut. It provided an authoritative foundation for Connecticut Federalism. In the eyes of men like Timothy Dwight it sufficed to disprove the validity of all democratic aspiration. If the mass of men were outcasts from God—as the doctrine assumed—if they had no title or interest in the prerogatives of the elect, it was a presumption little short of blasphemous to assert that they were competent to manage the temporal affairs of society. Surely it was never intended by the divine wisdom that the sons of Adam should rule the children of God, that the powers of darkness should legislate for the lovers of light. In the background of Calvinistic thought the assumption persisted that the Saints are God's delegated policemen on whom devolves the responsibility of keeping order amongst the sinners. The politician seeking the votes of sinners would not, of course, put it so bluntly; but the doctrine was there implicitly, providing a high sanction for the major premises of New England Federalism. It was this translation into political terms of a decadent dogma that the democratic doctrine of natural rights ran full against in its slow progress through New England. It colored the thinking of the upper class, provided a useful sanction for their strict censorship of society, authorized their rigid monopoly of all political power. It is not easy to understand high Federalists like Jedidiah Morse, who taught the youth of New England in his Geography that the clergy was an autocratic balance against democracy, unless they are set against the background of such obsolete dogma.

A special and particular justification of the doctrine, in the opinion of New England conservatives, was provided in the disturbant spread of populistic heresies. The years following the peace of 'eighty-three were an unhappy period for a New England sadly confused by its Shays' Rebellion and its New Hampshire and Rhode Island agrarianism. A motley brood of war chickens were coming home to roost, and there was much unseemly clamor in the New England farmyard. Respectable fowls of the old breed resented the scrambling of newcomers for the best perches, and the nondescript loudly demanded what liberty meant if they were still to have no place to roost. In the opinion of honest gentlemen government was becoming mob-ridden and populistic legislatures were officially profaning the sacred principle that the political state should function in the interests of the well-to-do. Naturally they began to inquire into the causes of such untoward happenings, and took counsel with each other how best to prevent any such in the future. It was quickly agreed that democracy was the mother of the mischief abroad in the land, and that if the ancient virtues of New England were not to go down before the mob, gentlemen must reassert the authority of their traditional stewardship. On them rested the responsibility of saving society from anarchy.

It was from the passions let loose by the profound social readjustments then going forward, that New England Federalism was born, of which the Connecticut Wits were such stalwart exemplars. It was the political philosophy of the Puritan-Yankee, and its principles were derived from the dogmas of Calvinism and the needs of mercantilism. In its beginnings it was a reaction from agrarianism. It had first taken coherence from the menace of Shays' Rebellion, but it was enormously strengthened by the later spread of French Revolutionary doctrines. The appearance of Jacobinism in America put all respectable New England in a panic, and the virulence of dislike increased with the rise of the Democratic Societies. The doctrine of equalitarianism was a stench in the nostrils of all who loved the aristocratic ways of an earlier America, and they watched with growing concern the flocking to New England of old-world enthusiasts for liberty who threw in their lot with the disaffected amongst the native yeomanry. The Irish seem to have been the most offensive equalitarians. A New England gentleman, traveling in Pennsylvania in the 'nineties, wrote home: "I have seen many, very many, Irishmen, and with a few exceptions, they are … the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell." And in 1798 Harrison Gray Otis, the Federalist boss, wrote: "If some means are not adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen & others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty & property." To prevent, if possible, such an unhappy outcome, the upper classes of New England fell to drilling and organizing all the elements of conservatism for the purpose of a common defense. They wrote and spoke and preached, till the mind of respectable New England was saturated with prejudice. It was a golden age of propaganda. The democratic principle was converted into a bogy to frighten the simple. Such a hideous misshapen imp of darkness, such a vile hag of anarchy had never before been painted for the imagination of honest Yankees to shudder at; and if democracy seemed to them a wild and fearsome thing making ready to destroy their ancient social order, they only believed what the minister preached on the sabbath and the squire asserted on week-days. What headway could the plebeian democrat, very likely in debt, hope to make against the organized respectability of society! He was overwhelmed by a combined odium theologicum et politicum.

This well-bred composite of old prejudice and present interest, this close alliance of Calvinistic dogma and mercantile profits, provides the background against which the Connecticut Wits must be placed. They were stalwart Federalists of the common New England school, and of this dignified Federalism John Adams was the philosopher, Fisher Ames the orator and pamphleteer, and Timothy Pickering the practical politician. Meticulous in dress, careful to appear well in public, professing to be the special custodian of every public and private virtue, it presented to a credulous constituency the similitude of an angel of light warring against the ancient powers of darkness. It was as the sword of Gideon to smite the Philistines. But for the comprehension of a more sophisticated generation it may be designated as the tie-wig school of American politics. The phrase sufficiently suggests its aristocratic antecedents. It was the party of the gentry. It was the last marshaling of the eighteenth century against the gathering forces of revolution, a stubborn attempt to bind changing conditions upon an earlier experience, a final effort to retain minority control of a society fast slipping from its grasp. Its affections were engaged to the past, to those static times when successive generations followed in the footsteps of the fathers, content to preserve what had hitherto existed. Aristocratic in taste, it was mercantile in its economic interests. Taking form before the rise of Lowell, industrialism changed the dominant economic interest of New England, it approved the dignified ways of legitimate trade, and disapproved the rising spirit of speculation.

The philosophy of this old-fashioned Federalism is an open book to whoever will take the trouble to turn a few pages of the yellow tracts. In part it derived from certain principles of Locke; in its major premises it was akin to English Whiggery; but its particular form was shaped by the traditional spirit of New England. As amplified in the solid works of John Adams it rested on a few broad principles, which, in his opinion, were as demonstrable as any theorem in Euclid. As a sound eighteenth century realist he discovered the basis of all politics in economics. Natural endowment, he was fond of pointing out, divides men into classes. Since every civilization rests upon exploitation, the strong and capable will rise to power on the backs of the weak, and those who have gained control of the economics of society will in the very nature of things rule society. The principle of aristocracy, hence, is implanted in the constitution of man, and to assume the principle of equality is to fly in the face of nature. From this universal fact of natural social classes arises the perennial problem of government, which is to secure order and justice in a society where few are friendly to their sway. In every society a potential class war for ever impends, and when customary restraints are loosed it breaks forth to find issue either in the anarchy of the mass or in the tyranny of the despot. Thus far Adams was translating Calvinistic dogma into political terms; under the mask of natural aristocracy and the incompetency of democracy, reappear the familiar doctrines of total depravity and the remnant of the Saints. But he was far too thoughtful a student of history and too sincerely concerned for political justice, to deduce from his premises conclusions wholly congenial to New England Federalism. He refused to narrow his philosophy to serve the ends of a particular class. That work fell to the ready hands of Fisher Ames, the idol of respectable New England, the complete embodiment of the prejudices of the tie-wig school. What particular twist Fisher Ames gave to the current philosophy, and from what sources he drew those asperities of conviction that edged his political views, are peculiarly suggestive to one who would understand the acrid dogmatisms of Theodore and Timothy, Dwight or the acerbities of Dr. Lemuel Hopkins.

A caustic little gentleman suffering from an aggravated case of the political spleen, was this orator and pamphleteer who won such great renown among his fellow Yankees. Vivacious and intolerant, he nodded his tie-wig dogmatically and pronounced his opinions oracularly. A confirmed realist, he walked the streets of Boston a visible embodiment of a century that was passing. He relished his ample store of prejudices and prided himself on the skill with which he set them forth. If he was not the repository of all political wisdom that he believed himself to be, he could at least give a reason for the faith that was in him. His political philosophy, the sufficiency of which he never doubted, was an amalgam of Puritanism and economics, an ethical adaptation of the stake-in-society principle that conferred a special sanction on the rule of the squirarchy. In the primitive Calvinist-Yankee world, it must be remembered, such political theory as developed was shaped by the theocratic conception of stewardship, by which was meant an authoritative leadership reposing in the best and the wisest, serving the divine purpose and subject to the will of God as revealed in the Bible. Minister and magistrate, in consequence, professed to justify their acts, not by expediency or temporal interest, but by absolute ethical standards. The will of God was acknowledged to be the single source of law. Of that perfect law the minister was the expositor and the magistrate the executive. In the theocracy there was no place for the conception of democracy; the will of the majority was unrecognized; government was simplified to the narrow routine of adjudicating causes in accordance with the divine decrees. But unhappily the business of stewardship proved to be as tempting there as elsewhere. The interests of the steward too often confused themselves with God's, and as the Saints prospered they more and more confounded ethical and economic values, until the primitive doctrine of the stewardship slid over into the later doctrine of the stake-in-society. The sacred rights of property came to be the final objective of law and order, and government was looked upon as an agency to serve the interests of the dominant class.

Of this school of Puritan-Yankee theory Fisher Ames was a convinced disciple. Instinctively aristocratic, a lawyer with a narrow legalistic mind, he interpreted justice in terms of the common law of contract, and stewardship as the prerogative of the well-to-do to police society. The political state he regarded as the particular guardian of vested interests. "But the essence, and almost the quintessence, of good government is," he argued, "to protect property and its rights. When these are protected, there is scarcely any booty left for oppression to seize; the objects and motives to usurpation and tyranny are removed. By securing property, life and liberty can scarcely fail of being secured; where property is safe by rules and principles, there is liberty." In every society, he believed, the persistent enemy of property are the propertyless. The major business of government becomes, therefore, the problem of keeping in due subjection to law and order the dangerous mass of the poor and vicious. That the poor in the main are vicious, and the vicious poor, he accepted as social axioms. Hence followed two major principles that he regarded as fundamental in any rational political theory: that government must be energetic to inspire fear in its subjects; that it must be strong to hold in subjection the unruly. The principle of coercive sovereignty he advocated as vehemently as Hamilton. In the doctrine of good will he put no faith. "Government does not subsist by making proselytes to sound reason, or by compromise and arbitration with its members; but by the power of the community compelling the obedience of individuals. If that is not done, who will seek its protection, or fear its vengeance?"

Since in every society it is the improvident mass that is dangerous to the established order, the folly of the democratic principle seemed to him too patent to be worthy of serious consideration. All about him he discovered a selfish and licentious multitude unfriendly to justice, to that sober restraint and respect for rights necessary to a well-ordered society. To permit sovereign power to fall into such hands was to invite anarchy. The mortal disease of all democracies he discovered in their immorality. That the wicked will rule wickedly, seemed to him as plain as way to parish church. A democracy, he used to assert, sooner or later will make every people "thoroughly licentious and corrupt." "The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness, which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty." "There is universally a presumption in democracy that promises everything; and at the same time an imbecility that can accomplish nothing, not even preserve itself." The sole security of society he discovered in the wisdom and firmness of the minority; and that minority, in the nature of things, must be the minority of the wealthy. The rich alone may permit themselves the luxury of disinterestedness. The propertied classes alone enjoy the leisure that is prerequisite to culture. Weighted with responsibility, they alone may be trusted to act as just stewards of society. To preserve New England, gravely threatened by demagogues like Daniel Shays—"bankrupts and sots, who have gambled or slept away their estates"—to prevent the devastating incursions of democracy, to assure the wise rule of a responsible minority, became therefore the master passion of Fisher Ames's life, to which he devoted himself with ever diminishing faith in the honesty of his fellow men. With all the intensity of his nature he hated Jefferson and Madison, "those apostles of the race-track and the cock-pit," and the French romantic philosophy they did so much to spread. But though black pessimism grew upon him in his later years, he discovered certain crumbs of comfort in his own virtue and the virtue of that Federalistic remnant that might even yet save Israel from the democratic despoilers. An unreconstructed Tory of a passing age, he was the most distinguished representative of the tie-wig school of political realism.

Of this virtuous remnant the Connecticut Wits were self-confessed exemplars. They were apostles of culture and patriotism to a people in grave danger of being seduced by strange gods. As they looked affectionately upon the pleasant little commonwealth of Connecticut, they feared for the future of this "model of free states." Agrarian dangers threatened from beyond the borders, and within matters were not going well. Her best sons were being drained off by the western frontier; her stagnant agriculture was proving inadequate to the economic needs of the people; a new capitalism was emerging with the development of banking and insurance; shipping and industrialism were making headway, and the towns were growing at the expense of the country. In short Connecticut was at the beginning of profound economic changes that in the next generation were to produce a political revolution. As the members of the little group contemplated these impending changes they were filled with concern. Their loyalties and their interests alike held them to the old order, so far as Connecticut was concerned, but their patriotism went out to the new venture in nationalism. Narrowly provincial in their local affections, they loved to envisage a glorious future for the emancipated states. A fervid patriotism runs through much of their work. The tremendous stir that came with the close of the Revolutionary War touched all the fields of polite culture, and summoned the Wits to activity. The duty of nationalism had been suddenly laid upon the conscience of thoughtful men. It was time for a free people to rid themselves of their colonial subservience to old-world culture. All things were being new-made, why not letters? To throw off the incubus of the past, and create a national literature, dedicated to the new America that was rising, seemed to many a patriotic duty. In this pressing work men wholly diverse in political sympathies joined heartily. The arch conservative, Noah Webster, devoted his life to differentiating the language of independent America from that of monarchical England; and Philip Freneau paused in his labors of berating the Federalists, to lament the intellectual subservience of America to old-world scholarship, as evidenced by its proneness to import British school-masters. The result was a premature attempt to write a declaration of intellectual independence, the youthful beginning of a long endeavor that needed more than a hundred years to accomplish.

Yet by a curious turn of the tide the work of emancipation was stopped almost before it was well begun. The extraordinary rise of French liberalism, with the resultant breakup of old orders, produced a panic amongst the cultivated classes of New England, and the imperialistic career of Napoleon threw them back into the arms of England. The earlier patriotism of revolution that was eager to make over all things, gave way to the patriotism of conservatism that desired nothing changed. The term "innovation" came to assume a sinister meaning in respectable ears. "A change, though for the better, is always to be deplored by the generation in which it is effected," asserted Fisher Ames. "Much is lost and more is hazarded." The disintegrating triumphs of political romanticism brought under a cloud the ideals of literary romanticism, and with the resurgence of the conservative spirit literature turned back to earlier models, with the consequent strengthening of the decadent Wit ideal. The romantic school discovered no followers in New England till the War of 1812 dissipated the dun twilight of the old and brought a new century to Boston. Between the years 1807 and 1812, marked by Bryant's The Embargo and Lines to a Waterfowl, occurred the great transition from the old century to the new, from the Wit ideal to the romantic.

The beginnings of the literary movement that produced the work of the Connecticut group, perhaps are to be found in the quickening interest in polite letters at Yale College in the late 'sixties. When Trumbull and Dwight became tutors there, they joined in the attempt then under way to revive a dead curriculum by the introduction of contemporary English literature, and they exemplified their creative interest by producing original work, Trumbull contributing The Progress of Dulness and Dwight The Conquest of Canaan. The literary fashion thus introduced was late Augustan, dominated by Goldsmith and Churchill, but supplemented by Pope and Thomson of an earlier generation. The work was consciously imitative. The immediate influence of Goldsmith and Denham on Dwight's Greenfield Hill is so evident as scarcely to need comment; The Deserted Village and Cooper's Hill suggested the theme and indicated the method of treatment. When they essayed greater originality, as became free poets of a republic, their work was likely to issue in a dubious exploitation of biblical themes or in an exuberant patriotism. The Conquest of Canaan and The Vision of Columbus are representative of the impulses that swayed the minds of the young Wits before the rise of domestic revolution threatened the permanence of the traditional Connecticut order.

But only a portion of the work of the "Wits," after all, was primarily literary. The times soon became too exigent for belletristic philandering, and with the demands of partisanship laid upon them they dedicated their pens to successive causes. The war first summoned them, then the contest with populism, then the cause of the federal union, and finally the acrimonious struggle against French romantic philosophies and the party of Jefferson. Their verse became increasingly militant, and the note of satire rose above the occasional bucolic strains. For the serious business of poetic warfare they sought inspiration from Churchill and the contemporary English satirists. The long party struggle between Whig and Tory in England, and the later contest between Toryism and Jacobinism, produced an abundant crop of scurrilous satire that debased the tone of English letters for half a century. Pope's mean and vindictive Dunciad and Butler's Hudibras—jaunty octosyllabics providing a brisk variation from the barbed pentameters—had shown that satire could be as useful to a gentleman as the small sword, and the literary dueling of rival partisans went on briskly. In this warfare of the English poetasters the American Wits found their weapons provided for them, and they hastened to follow the overseas example. They seized eagerly upon such works as the Rolliad, a contemporary English satire written by bright young politicians in defense of Fox and Sheridan, as suggestive models. They sharpened their quills to a needle point, dipped them in bitter ink, and pricked their opponents as mercilessly as English gentlemen were doing. It is not pleasant writing, much of it is ill done, it runs the scale from crude burlesque to downright blackguardry; but it suggests, as the soberer prose of the times does not, the raw nerves of a generation trying to stave off a rout. To ignore such a work as The Anarchiad, on the ground that it is very bad poetry, is to miss what is perhaps the most significant phase of their contribution to a generation perplexed by rival counselors.

The membership of the group was a bit elastic, additions and withdrawals changing the personnel as the years passed. The more important members were John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Richard Alsop, and Theodore Dwight. To these are frequently added the names of Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith and Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, who were rather friends than active collaborators. Of the entire group Trumbull was perhaps the most gifted, Barlow the most original, and Timothy Dwight the most prolific. None to be sure loved the pruning knife, and none stinted the ready flow of his verse; yet the indefatigable Timothy managed to outrun the rest. They were all pretty much of an age. The oldest were Trumbull and Dr. Hopkins, both born in 1750; Timothy Dwight and Colonel Humphreys were two years younger; Barlow was born in 1754, Alsop in 1761, and Theodore Dwight, the baby of the group, was born in 1764 and survived till 1846. Collectively they were fairly representative of the oligarchical upper class of the provincial Connecticut society. Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was a minister and president of Yale; Hopkins, Smith, and Cogswell were physicians of high standing, Trumbull and Theodore Dwight were lawyers, Barlow and Humphreys found their way into the diplomatic field, and Alsop was a merchant. They were all comfortably well off and several were wealthy. Alsop was one of the few millionaires of the time; Barlow acquired a fortune in France; and Humphreys late in life established a textile industry incorporated for half a million.

Although their literary work reveals little individual differentiation, they were men of notable ability and striking individuality, who would have made themselves felt in any community. The lesser members were quite as interesting as the major. The caustic tongue of Hopkins and the genial ways of Alsop were as individual as the distinguished manners of Colonel Humphreys, or the brilliant acerbity of Theodore Dwight. Perhaps the most attractive of the entire group was David Humphreys, son of a clergyman of Derby, Connecticut, and personal aide to Washington, whose Yankee provincialisms were worn away by much travel and familiar intercourse with distinguished men in Europe and America. That he was an unusually likable man, as well as capable, is suggested by his extraordinary advancement and the warm affection felt for him by those high in position, as well as by the plump face and easy tie-wig that appear in his portrait. Upwards of fourteen years he spent abroad. His friendships were many and his polished manners seem to have won all hearts. His love of country was great and constant, and his disinterested endeavors to further the well-being of America were widely recognized. He entered Yale in 1767, where he fell in with Trumbull and Dwight. In 1775 at the age of twenty-three he joined the army with the rank of captain. Three years later he was assigned to the staff of General Putnam with the rank of major, and in 1780 he joined Washington's staff with the rank of colonel. He is said to have distinguished himself at the siege of Yorktown and was voted a sword by Congress for gallantry; but as such rewards were commonly political, the distinction must not be taken too seriously. After the peace he went to Paris as Secretary to the Legation under Franklin and Adams, but returned to Hartford on the eve of the outbreak of Shays' Rebellion. He was appointed to the command of a regiment of Western Reserves—raised under authority of Congress to put down domestic disturbances; but on the suppression of the revolt he went to Mount Vernon and remained there for upwards of a year, acting as Washington's aide on the trip to New York where the new President took the oath of office. From 1791 to 1802 he was minister to Lisbon and Madrid, where through the skillful agency of Barlow he secured a treaty with the Barbary states for the release of American captives. In 1795 he married an Englishwoman of considerable fortune. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London, was on intimate terms with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt in France, and when he returned to America soon after the accession of Jefferson, he was one of the distinguished men of his generation of Americans.

The Connecticut to which he returned in 1802 was in the midst of a far-reaching revolution that was silently transforming the traditional order of life. Banking, insurance, and shipping were going forward amazingly, but agriculture was stagnant, the domestic economy prevailed on the farms, there was no important staple for export, and industrialism was in its infancy. It was to a situation becoming acute that Humphreys brought his old-world observations, and the solution on which he settled assumed the double form of improving agricultural methods and encouraging the production of a staple for manufacturing purposes. While at Madrid he had interested himself in the quality of wool grown by the Merino sheep. The Spanish jealously guarded their flocks against export, but on his quitting his post he was permitted, in lieu of the usual gift to departing ministers, to ship one hundred head to his estate in Connecticut. He at once engaged in the business of breeding, and set on foot a movement to educate the Connecticut farmers in wool growing. He established looms to weave a fine woolen cloth, and when Madison took the oath of office in 1809 he was dressed in a suit of domestic goods, the coat of which was provided by Colonel Humphreys. Entering upon the work as an experiment, he expanded the industry till in 1810 the Humphreysville Manufacturing Company was chartered, with a capital stock of $500,000. But his major interest, as was natural to an eighteenth century squire, lay in agriculture. He turned his farm into an experiment station and in 1817 he founded the Connecticut Agricultural Society.

To further the cause in which he was embarked Humphreys frequently impressed his pen into service. While in Europe he had often meditated on the beneficent effects of sober habits of industry, and in particular how such industry must assure an expanding well-being in America with its vast potential resources. To inculcate this spirit he had written several didactic poems—On the Happiness of America, and On the Future Glory of the United States of America; but the completest expression of the ideal to which his later years were devoted is given in a poem On the Industry of the United States of America, which provides an excellent summary of his social and economic views. As literature it is scarcely notable, but as a document of the times it deserves recalling. An honest and capable man was Colonel David Humphreys—what we should call today a public-spirited citizen, devoted to republican freedom and concerned for the well-being of his fellow Americans. Although he was one of the first Yankee industrialists to popularize the philosophy of industrialism, he remained at heart a son of that older world that honored agriculture above all other callings.

Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, son of a Waterbury farmer, was the most picturesque member of the group, the most characteristically Yankee. Brought up at the plow tail, he received nevertheless an excellent education, and because of a hereditary predisposition to consumption turned to the medical profession. After serving his apprenticeship with a physician at Wallingford he entered upon his practice at Litchfield in 1776. During the Revolution he served for a short time as a volunteer, but soon returned to his lancet and medicine case. In 1784 he removed to Hartford to spend the remainder of his life there as physician and man of letters. In person he was tall, lean, stooping, rawboned, with coarse features and large brilliant eyes. His uncouth appearance and eccentricity of manner made him a striking figure, and his caustic wit made him a redoubtable antagonist. His memory was a marvel to his friends. "He could quote verbatim," writes Kettell, "every writer, medical and literary, that he had ever read." As a physician he stood at the head of the Connecticut profession, both in reputation and in skill. He was one of the founders of the Medical Society of Connecticut, and as a frequent contributor to medical literature he exerted a wide influence on the current practice.

The eccentric Doctor seems to have been as honest as he was outspoken. He was uncompromising in his warfare on all quacks, both medical and political. For a time as a young man he was a disciple of French infidel philosophy, but he cured his mental indisposition by a severe biblical regimen, and having restored himself to the robust health of Calvinistic Christianity, he devoted himself to the work of curing others. He became in consequence a specialist in the treatment of the Bacillus gallicus. Kettell is authority for a story that reminds one of his Epitaph on a Patient Killed by a Cancer Quack. Calling one day with Dr. Cogswell on a patient in the last stages of consumption, he was shown a packet of "fever powders" reputed to be of marvelous curative potency, got from a well known local quack. "How administered?" the Doctor asked the nurse. "In molasses," she replied. Some molasses was brought and Hopkins took an entire paper of the powders, stirred it in a cup, and disregarding the protestations of the nurse, drank off the whole. Turning to Cogswell, he remarked: "I am going to Coventry today. If I die from this, write on my tombstone—'Here lies Hopkins killed by Grimes.'" A man who was willing to take a chance in order to demonstrate the quackery of a peripatetic dispenser of miraculous powders would have scant respect for any sort of humbug. For all political nostrums not listed in the Federalistic materia medica, he exhibited the same brusque contempt. He would temporize with what he regarded as quackery in government no more than in medicine, and when the Rhode Island legislature passed its paper money act in 1785, and six months later Shays' Rebellion broke out, and mobs were besieging the legislature of New Hampshire, he proposed to speak plainly to the good people of Connecticut on the follies of popular delusions. This would seem to have been the origin of The Anarchiad, the most celebrated political satire of the times. It sprang from the indignation of Dr. Hopkins, when, to quote from the poem,

In visions fair, the scenes of fate unroll,
And Massachusetts opens on my soul.
There Chaos, Anarch old, asserts his sway,
And mobs in myriads blacken all the way.

That Hopkins was chiefly responsible for The Anarchiad may be regarded as fairly certain, and that he contributed its most caustic portions may be accepted likewise. Kettell specifically attributed to him the portion entitled "A Plea for Union and the Constitution." The sardonic temper of the Doctor fitted him for virulent satire, and in this bitterest of the productions of the Wits the reins were on the neck of his muse. Some hand he had also in the writing of The Echo, but his chief contributions are believed to have taken the form of suggestions which Alsop put into verse. Other works in which he is supposed to have had a share were: The Political Greenhouse, done in collaboration with Alsop and Theodore Dwight—Hopkins' contributions being the passages on Tom Thumb and the arrival of Genet; The Democratiad, a personal and political satire written for the Philadelphia Jockey Club; and The Guillotina, or a Democratic Dirge, written for the Hartford Courant as a New Year's offering and printed January 1, 1796. Three other satires attributed to him are: The Hypocrite's Hope, The Epitaph on a Patient Killed by a Cancer Quack, and Verses on General Ethan Allen. That he had a knack at trenchant satire is sufficiently evident; and that he loved to impale a pretender with a poisoned epithet—that he could not resist the temptation to stick a pin in any bladder he met with, would argue that Dr. Lemuel Hopkins was a man who loved to speak his mind.

To recover the authentic lineaments of Richard Alsop from the faded records, is no easy task. The years have almost wholly obscured a fame that in his lifetime was as bright as a May day, with the poetic fields all abloom. A pleasant-mannered, agreeable gentleman, he seems to have been; with the exception of Trumbull perhaps the wittiest if not the cleverest of the group. He was born in Middletown, where his father, a prosperous merchant in New York, and for five years a member of the Continental Congress, had been born before him, and whither the latter removed upon the occupation of New York City by the British forces. He attended Yale for a time but did not take his degree, having been withdrawn by his father to be bred up in the mercantile business. This was the golden age of Connecticut shipping, and his ventures proved unusually successful. From the coastwise and West Indian traffic he amassed a great fortune. All his life he seems to have been a bookish man. To an excellent knowledge of the classics he added a generous acquaintance with English literature, and he even carried his studies into continental fields, French, Italian and Spanish, extending them so far as to embrace the Scandinavian literatures. A pronounced leaning towards the new gothic spirit that was undermining the Wit ideal in England, is revealed in his translations from Ossian and his fondness for the Eddas. Pale and exotic as such work might be, it sets him apart from the other members of the group, allying him with certain of the minor Philadelphia poets who followed the gothic fashion more closely. His genial temperament made him a general favorite, and his ample means afforded him abundant leisure. He was warm-hearted, simple and unaffected in manners. His lively imagination and playful humor made him an excellent companion; and his inexhaustible enthusiasm for poetic composition thrust him into every undertaking of the group. The collective reputation of the Wits seems to have owed much to the pen of Alsop. He died at Flatbush, Long Island, in 1815.

His writings have never been collected and much remains unprinted. He was distinctly an amateur in letters and turned to whatever theme caught his fancy. He was an incorrigible imitator of late eighteenth century English modes, and his most ambitious poem, The Charm of Fancy—a philosophical work in four cantos, only a fragment of which has been printed—is an echo of Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination. Other ambitious attempts were a versification of Ossian, Habakkuk, and The Twilight of the Gods. Like every other poetaster of the times he lamented the death of the first President, his contribution taking the form of a Monody on the Death of George Washington. Later he translated from the Italian The Natural and Civil History of Chili, and just before his death he edited The Captivity and Adventures of J. R. Jewett Among the Savages of Nootka Sound. His most interesting work lay in the field of satire. In collaboration with Theodore Dwight he conceived The Echo and wrote considerable portions, in particular Number IX, Governor Hancock's Message on Stage Plays, and Number XX, Jefferson's Inaugural. The playful note of The Echo, that sets it sharply apart from the bitter Anarchiad, was attributed at the time to Alsop, and the genial burlesques of current provincialisms remain his most important contribution to the verse of New England. It was started to amuse the members of a club at Middletown, and was printed in the American Mercury. Cogswell, Smith, and Hopkins had a hand in its composition, but to Alsop and Dwight belongs the major credit.

In his own time Theodore Dwight, lawyer, editor, politician, and poetaster, was one of the most noted of the Wits; but the years have proved ungrateful, and his personality has become as dim as Alsop's. More deeply immersed in practical politics than any other member of the group, he was perhaps the most vehemently Federalistic—if shades may be discerned where all were dipped in the same strong dye. He was born at Northampton, Massachusetts, and took his degree at Yale. A cousin of Timothy Dwight, he studied law in the office of another kinsman, Judge Pierrepont Edwards, an eminent lawyer, high in the ruling aristocracy of Connecticut. From his tutor he seems to have learned little of that political liberalism that afterwards made Edwards the leader of the Connecticut Jeffersonians. He practiced his profession for a time at Hartford, later removing to New York to become a partner in the office of his cousin Aaron Burr; but dissenting from Burr's political opinions, he returned to Hartford. He served in Congress for a year, where he ventured into combat with John Randolph of Roanoke. In after years he devoted much time to newspaper work. In 1810 he founded The Connecticut Mirror, later removed to Albany to edit The Daily Advertiser, and in 1829 he went to New York City as editor of The Daily Advertiser of that place.

Better perhaps than any other member of the group he reveals the close interrelation in Connecticut of religion, politics, and business. He was a director of the Connecticut Bible Society—a religious political organization, the lay trustees of which, according to Purcell, were "Federalist bosses," and which was generally accounted by the opposition as being under clerical control. With his cousin Timothy he was a director of the Eagle Bank, a strong Federalist institution, and was bitterly opposed to the chartering of rival Republican banks. When the Phoenix Bank, a Republican-Episcopalian institution, applied to the legislature for a charter, he denounced it as "the child of intrigue and the mother of Discord." The new banking power was too useful to the ruling Congregational-Federalist party, to be suffered to pass into the hands of the disaffected. Politically Dwight seems to have been under the influence of Fisher Ames, Timothy Pickering, and Harrison Gray Otis. He served as secretary to the Hartford Convention, and later as its historian, publishing its Journal in 1833 with a defense of the movement. He was appealed to by Ames to introduce The Boston Palladium—the organ of high Federalism in Massachusetts—amongst "the clergy and good men" of Connecticut. He defended the preaching of politics in the pulpit as an excellent means of thwarting the democratic partisans who were seeking to "discredit the ministry, decry religion, and destroy public worship." Democracy was anathema to him, and he agreed with Otis that something must be done to stem the tide of old-world democrats who threatened to submerge the familiar landmarks of New England. Commenting on the spread of republicanism, he attributed to it the decay of religion and morality, and the impending break-up of family ties, exclaiming with somewhat extreme vivacity: "The outlaws of Europe, the fugitives from the pillory, and the gallows, have undertaken to assist our own abandoned citizens, in the pleasing work of destroying Connecticut … Can imagination paint anything more dreadful on this side of hell?"

Dwight is reputed to have been a brilliant debater, and his political writings are crisp and vigorous. His chief contributions to the work of the Wits are to be found in The Echo and The Political Greenhouse. The more biting pieces in the former are generally attributed to him. In the use of Hudibrastic verse he was probably the cleverest of the group if we except Trumbull; his sharp and bitter nature seeming to enjoy inflicting pin-pricks on his enemies. Of high personal integrity he permitted himself an occasional indulgence in humanitarianism, and like his cousin Timothy he was an outspoken opponent of slavery. Yet after all Theodore Dwight was not an important man in spite of his heritage of Edwards blood. The liberalism of his grandfather seems not to have descended to him, for he lived and died an acidulous upholder of the old order, the last of the tie-wig school of Federalists.

Remain for brief comment the three members of the group whose reputations still exhibit some evidences of vitality.… The lesser men have survived collectively, in those collaborations that comment pungently on the ways of the hour. Suggestive as such comments are to the historian, they do not rank high in a history of American belleslettres, and the several individualities of the contributors are so merged that the critic finds difficulty in separating the whole into its parts. But Trumbull, Dwight, and Barlow may be accounted authentic men of letters, whose work is individual enough to be of some little importance in the development of our early literature. The striking variation of the Yankee character, as revealed in the scholarly Trumbull, the vigorously dogmatic Dwight, and the rebelliously energetic Barlow, is an interesting commentary on the fertility of that old New England in breeding men of diverse capacities.

There was the best of Yankee blood in the veins of John Trumbull. Among his kinsmen were the Reverend Benjamin Trumbull, historian of Connecticut, Governor Jonathan Trumbull—Washington's Brother Jonathan—and John Trumbull the painter. On his mother's side he was descended from the vigorous Solomon Stoddard, grandfather of Jonathan Edwards. His father was a scholarly minister, long a trustee of Yale College, at which school the son spent seven years as undergraduate and tutor. He was a precocious youth with a strong love of polite letters, and a praiseworthy desire to achieve literary distinction. Greek and Latin were the toys of his childhood and when he was seven years of age he passed the entrance examination to college. During the period of his tutorship he joined with Dwight and Joseph Howe in the work of overhauling the curriculum, supplementing Lilly's Grammar and Calvin with Pope and Churchill. Like other aspiring youths of the time he dabbled with Spectator papers, practiced his couplets, and eventually produced The Progress of Dulness, the cleverest bit of academic verse till then produced in America. At heart Trumbull was thoroughly academic, and nothing would have suited his temperament better than the life of a Yale professor; but the prospects seeming unfavorable, he began to mingle Blackstone with the poets in preparation for his future profession.

He was thus engaged during the middle years of the long dispute with England, the bitter wranglings of which seem not to have penetrated his quiet retreat. But in 1773 he resigned his tutorship to prepare himself further in the law. Removing to Boston he entered the office of John Adams, then rising to prominence as a spokesman of the popular party; and he took lodgings in the house of Caleb Cushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Placed thus at the storm center of provincial politics, he was soon infected with the common dissatisfaction with ministerial policies, and joined himself to the patriotic party. When Adams went to Philadelphia to sit in the Congress, Trumbull withdrew to Hartford, where he established himself. Before quitting Boston he published an Elegy on the Times, a political tract that seemed to Adams so useful to the cause that he marked the young poet for future service, and the year following he encouraged the writing of M'Fingal, the first part of which appeared in 1775. So great was the prestige that followed its appearance that Trumbull tinkered with it during the next seven years, publishing it finally in its completed form in 1782. The law seems to have been a jealous mistress then as now, and his dreams of further literary work were inadequately realized. He is believed to have had a hand in The Anarchiad, and he wrote some minor poems; but he soon drifted into politics, went on the bench, finally removed to Detroit in 1825, and died there at the home of his daughter in 1831, at the age of eighty-one. He had outlived his revolutionary generation, long outlived his literary ambitions, and was pretty much forgotten before he died. His collected works, published in 1820, proved a losing venture for the printer. America was turning romantic and few, it seems, cared to invest in two volumes of echoes.

Trumbull's reputation rests almost exclusively on M'Fingal. It was immensely popular in its time. More than thirty pirated editions were issued. It was broadcast by "newspapers, hawkers, pedlars, and petty chapmen," and it served its partisan purpose. The author was complimented by the Marquis de Chastellux on fulfilling all the conditions of burlesque poetry as approved since the days of Homer; but in spite of the indisputable cleverness of some of the lines, it is not a great work. In its final form it is spun out to extreme length, and pretty much swamped by the elaborate machinery on which the author visibly prided himself. Even in the thick of attack Trumbull did not forget his reading, but explains his allusions with meticulous care. He seems, indeed, rather more concerned about the laws of the mock epic than the threatened rights of America. The Scotch Tory hero is a figure so unlike the real Tory—the Olivers and Leonards and Hutchinsons, with their love of power and dignified display—that the caricature loses in effectiveness. Trumbull's patriotism was well bred and unmarked by fierce partisanship. His refined tastes ill fitted him for the turmoil of revolution. The ways of the radical were not lovely in his eyes; the Sons of Liberty with their tar and feather beds were too frequently rough fellows, and although they provided comic material to offset the blunderings of the Squire, they no doubt seemed to him little better than tools of demagogues. Very often this tousle-headed democracy behaved like a mob, and Trumbull in his tie-wig did not approve of mobs.

The more thoughtfully one reads M'Fingal, throwing upon it the light of the total career of its author, the more clearly one perceives that John Trumbull was not a rebellious soul, the stuff out of which revolutionaries are made. In the year 1773, while projecting some fresh adventures in the Spectator vein, "he congratulated himself on the fact 'that the ferment of politics' was, as he supposed, 'pretty much subsided,' and that at last the country was to enjoy a 'mild interval from the struggles of patriotism and self-interest, from noise and confusion, Wilkes and liberty.'" He had then no wish for embroilment in civil war. All his life he seems to have suffered from ill health, which probably sapped his militancy and lessened his pugnacity. From this settled mood came a certain detachment that suffered his partisanship to remain cooler than the passions of the time commonly allowed. He could permit himself the luxury of a laugh at the current absurdities; and it is this light-heartedness that made M'Fingal so immediately effective. The rollicking burlesque of the Tory argument, the telling reductio ad absurdum of their logic, must have tickled the ears of every Whig and provoked many a laugh in obscure chimney-seats. Laughter is the keenest of weapons, and Trumbull's gayety must have opened weak points in the Tory armor that were proof against Freneau's animosity. It was a rare note in those acrimonious times that produced the bitter invective of Jonathan Odell, and one likes Trumbull the better for minding his manners and engaging in the duel like a gentleman. After all this son of Yale had certain characteristics of the intellectual, and if his environment had been more favorable and the law had not claimed him, if he had enjoyed the ample leisure of Alsop, very likely he would have given a better account of the talents that were certainly his. He wrote with ease if not with finish, and he possessed the requisite qualities of a man of letters. A lovable man he seems to have been, but somewhat easy-going and indolent, too easily turned from his purpose; and in consequence his later life failed to realize the expectations of his early years.

Easy-going and lovable are certainly the last adjectives one would think of applying to the massive character of Timothy Dwight—a man armed at all points and walking amongst his fellows with magnificent confidence in his powers, a scholar who put his scythe in every field of knowledge and with flail and bellows separated the clean wheat from the tares, a mighty dialectician who annihilated Hume and Shaftesbury and Voltaire before breakfast and like Hotspur could say, "Fie upon this quiet life, I want work!" A tremendous figure indeed, a great preacher, an authoritative theologian, a distinguished educator—"every inch a college president"—a helpful counselor on any knotty point be it in law or politics or finance or literature or agriculture, a born leader of men, and by way of recreation an inditer of Hebraic epics and huge didactic poems and ample Connecticut pastorals, a confirmed traveler observing the ways of New England and adjoining states and preserving his observations in solid volumes for the enlightenment of others—here was a man to compel the admiration of his fellows and put his stamp upon his age. So vast was the reputation of Timothy Dwight and so many-sided, that after all these years one hesitates to question the superiority of his qualities or insinuate a doubt as to the fineness of this nugget of New England gold.

And yet the more curiously one considers the laborious life of the great President of Yale, the more insistent become one's doubts. It would seem that he impressed his fellow citizens by the completeness with which he measured up to every Connecticut ideal. He was a walking repository of the venerable status quo. His commanding presence and authoritative manner, his sonorous eloquence, his forwardness in defense of what few doubted, his vehement threshing of straw long since reduced to chaff, his prodigious labors, his abundant printing, seemed to his open-mouthed contemporaries the authentic seal of greatness. In his presence none had the temerity to deny it. Yet oddly enough that greatness has not survived the ravages of time. It has bated and dwindled sadly. Even Moses Coit Tyler, kindliest and most generous of critics, cannot take the great Timothy quite seriously. The figure would seem to have been blown to excessive dimensions by his admirers. He was certainly not so great as they esteemed him. He was very much smaller indeed, almost amusingly so. Scrutinize this father in Israel closely, remove from the scale the heavy weight of contemporary eulogy, and it appears that Timothy Dwight was not a real prophet, not an authentic voice at all, but only a sonorous echo; extraordinarily lifelike, to be sure, but only an echo. There was no sap of originality in him, no creative energy, but instead the sound of voices long silent, the chatter of a theology long since disintegrating, the authority of a hierarchy already falling into decay, the tongue in short of a dead past.

The intellectual inquisitiveness that gave birth to disintegrating tendencies in the mind of his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, and that made him such a revolutionary force in his time, was wholly lacking in the grandson. Timothy Dwight refused to follow the questioning intellect into unsurveyed fields. He would not meddle with change. His mind was closed as tight as his study windows in January. He read widely in the literature of rationalism, but he read only to refute. Now and then to be sure, certain liberal promptings visited him: he spoke out against slavery; he encouraged the higher education of women. But from such temptations to become a living voice he turned away to follow the main-traveled road of Connecticut prejudice. His eyes were fixed lovingly upon the past, and his fondest dreams for New England hovered about the ideal of a godly church-state which John Cotton had labored to establish and Increase Mather to preserve. Those capable theocrats of earlier days were his spiritual brothers. Two men could scarcely be more like than Timothy Dwight and Increase Mather; their careers ran in parallel lines; each of them was the unmitered pope of his generation, and each owed his extraordinary influence to the same sterling qualities. As ecclesiastical politicians they drew no line between religious and secular affairs, but were prompt with a hand in every affair of the commonwealth. They spoke and wrote with unquestioned authority. They regarded the minister as the responsible leader of society who must not suffer his flock to be led astray. The church was the guardian of morality and the state was its secular arm. The true faith must not be put in jeopardy by unfaith. To Timothy Dwight infidelity and republicanism went hand in hand, and to suffer the commonwealth to fall into the power of the godless meant an end to all religion and morality. To uphold the established order was for him, therefore, the first of Christian duties. A stalwart Federalist, he was a good hater of all Jacobins and a stout defender of the law and order for which he drew the plans and specifications. It was sometimes hinted that he was too much an aristocrat to feel the warmest sympathy for the unprosperous, and there seem to have been grounds for the suspicion. The unprosperous were likely to be republicans, and as he watched them being drawn off to the western frontier, he rejoiced that their voting power was no longer to be feared. Such restless spirits, he pointed out, "are impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality; grumble about the taxes, by which Rulers, Ministers, and Schoolmasters are supported … We have many troubles even now; but we should have more, if this body of foresters had remained at home." If the disaffected did not like the way the Congregational-Federalist party managed the good state of Connecticut, it were a godsend if they should remove beyond its boundaries.

But it is with the literary work of Timothy Dwight that we are more immediately concerned, and in all his abundant output, totaling fourteen volumes and perhaps as much more in manuscript, the same solid qualities are revealed. It is the occasional work of a man wanting humor, wit, playfulness, artistry, grace, lacking subtlety and suggestiveness, but with a shrewd common sense, a great vigor, and a certain grandiose imagination. A sonorous declaimer, he dearly loved combat and the shock of marshaled argument. He was always inviting majestic effects. In The Conquest of Canaan he described so many thunderstorms that Trumbull suggested he ought to furnish a lightning-rod with the poem. Such a man could not move easily in narrow spaces. An epic was none too slight to contain his swelling fancies or satisfy his rhetoric; he walks with huge strides; he is prodigal of images; one canto finished, other cantos clamor to emerge upon the page. His ready versification, one often feels, runs like a water pipe with the faucet off. There is never a pause to pick or choose; his words flow in an unbroken stream from his inkwell. Yet even in his amazing copiousness there is vigor; a well-stocked mind is pouring out the gatherings of years. When he pauses to give advice—as he was fond of doing—his abundant sense is worth listening to. The homely wisdom of his talk to the farmers in the sixth part of Greenfield Hill is not unlike Franklin. As a satirist he belongs to the Churchill school; he is downright, abusive, often violent, quite lacking the lightness of touch and easy gayety that run so pleasantly through M'Fingal. His Triumph of Infidelity is good old-fashioned pulpit-thumping. The spirit of toleration was withheld from him by his fairy godmother, and he knows no other way of dealing with those who persist in disagreement after their mistakes have been pointed out, than the cudgel. In this tremendous poem he lays about him vigorously. On Hume and Voltaire and Priestley, and all the host of their followers, his blows fall smartly. Bloody crowns ought to be plentiful, but—though the Doctor does not seem to know it—most of the blows fall on straw men and none proves to be mortal. On the whole one prefers him in the pastoral mood when he lays aside his ministerial gown, and Greenfield Hill, apart from Travels in New England and New York, justly remains his most attractive work. But even that is sadly in need of winnowing. A great college president Timothy Dwight is conceded to have been; he was worshiped by his admirers only this side idolatry; but a great thinker, a steadfast friend of truth in whatever garb it might appear, a generous kindly soul loving even publicans and sinners, regardful of others and forgetful of self, he assuredly was not. That he could ever have been looked upon as a great poet, is a fact to be wondered at.

That he should have long associated with the Hartford Wits and collaborated with them in defense of Connecticut Federalism, must have seemed to Joel Barlow in after years the choicest bit of comedy in his varied career. His subsequent adventures led him far from the strait path of Yale orthodoxy. In those ripe later years life had pretty well emptied him of all dogmatisms and taught him the virtue of catholic sympathies. He had become acquainted with diverse philosophies and had observed the ways of alien societies, and from such contacts the horizons of his mind had broadened and his character mellowed. It was a long road that he traveled from New Haven to his Washington salon. Born a Connecticut Yankee, he accepted in his youth all the Connecticut conventions, and graduated from Yale with as complete an assortment of respectable opinions as his classmate Noah Webster. An energetic capable fellow, he wanted to get on in life. He wanted to be rich and famous, and he tried many roads that promised to lead to that desirable goal—law, politics, journalism, poetry, psalmody, speculation. Wanting a job he volunteered soon after graduation as chaplain in the army. He had not prepared for the ministry and while preaching somewhat indifferently to ragged soldiers he dreamed of poetic fame, and devoted more time to his couplets than to pious meditation. His abilities discovering no more congenial field for their exercise than writing poetry, he was pretty much at a stand till chance sent him abroad as agent for one of the speculative land-companies that were rising like mushrooms in America. There he found his opportunity. In France, where he established his headquarters, he entered a world of thought vastly different from that of prim little Hartford. It was an extraordinarily stimulating experience into which he threw himself with zest. Eighteen years, from 1787 to 1805, he spent abroad on that first trip, and those years changed the provincial Yankee into one of the most cosmopolitan Americans of his generation. From a member of the Hartford Wits, ardent in defense of the traditional Connecticut order, he had become a citizen of the world, outspoken in defense of the rights of man.

It was this later Barlow, completely new-outfitted by French romantic tailors, that after years remember and that early friends could not forgive. In adopting the Jacobin mode and setting himself to the serious business of thinking, he invited the severe criticism of his former associates; yet nothing in his life was more creditable or marks him more definitely as an open-minded, intelligent man. He was as receptive to new ideas as Timothy Dwight was impervious. He plunged boldly into the maelstrom of speculation then boiling in Europe. He moved in the society of the intellectuals, inquired into the latest political and social theories, turned humanitarian, re-examined his Calvinistic theology in the light of current deism, and became one of the free democratic thinkers swarming in every European capital. He was equally at home in London and Paris, passing long periods of time in both cities. An active member of the Constitutional Society of London, he was intimate with Joseph Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Tom Paine, sympathized with every liberal movement and offered his pen to the cause of a freer England. His Advice to the Privileged Orders was eulogized by Fox on the floor of Commons, and the Pitt ministry was moved to suppress the work and proscribe the author. Thereupon Barlow went into hiding. There seems to have been considerable provocation for the government's action. "It is safe to say," remarks his biographer, "that no political work of the day created so wide an interest or was so extensively read." With Paine and Barlow both loose in England there was need of the government looking to its fences. In 1793 he was made a citizen of France. His French career was not unlike Paine's, whom he resembled in many ways. He had much of the latter's genius for publicity and skill in propaganda, and his career was a great stimulus to radicals at home. He risked his life to serve the American prisoners in Africa and by his skill and address eventually freed them. In the meantime he had not neglected his private affairs. He made a fortune in the French funds, which he increased by able merchandising. He had come to his goal by distant roads, and on his return to America in 1805 he took up his abode at Washington, creating a delightful country seat on the outskirts of the capital where he maintained a salon for American liberals. Unlike Colonel Humphreys he felt no inclinations toward Connecticut; the old ties were broken past mending; the French Jacobin could not fit into the grooves of Hartford Federalism. Six years later he was impressed a second time into the diplomatic service, was sent to France on a difficult mission, followed Napoleon, then on the Russian campaign, was caught in the break-up of the grand army, suffered exposure, contracted pneumonia, and died in a village near Cracow in Poland—a fate which honest Federalists regarded as amply merited by his vicious principles.

The later reputation of Barlow has been far less than his services warranted or his solid merits deserved. His admirable prose writings have been forgotten and the Columbiad returns always to plague him. The common detraction of all Jacobins and republicans fell heavily on so conspicuous a head. "It is simply impossible," says his biographer, "for the historian of Federal proclivities and environment, to do justice to the great leaders of Republicanism in America." Barlow paid a heavy price for his intellectual independence. Thus John Adams, who had suffered many a sharp thrust from him, wrote to Washington, "Tom Paine is not a more worthless fellow." Of the Yale dislike Barlow was well aware, for he once confessed that he would have presented the school with some needed chemical apparatus but he "supposed that, coming from him, the college authorities would make a bonfire of them in the college yard." Yet it is hard for a later generation to discover wherein lay the viciousness of his principles. A warm-hearted humanitarian, he was concerned always for the common well-being. The two major passions of his life were freedom and education. During the last years at Washington he was ardently promoting a plan for a great national university at the seat of government, and had he lived ten years longer his wide influence would probably have accomplished it. His sins would seem to have been no other than an open break with the Calvinism and Federalism of the Connecticut oligarchy—somewhat slender grounds on which to pillory him as an infidel and a scalawag.

The social foundation of Barlow's political philosophy is lucidly presented in the Advice to the Privileged Orders, partly reprinted in this edition; a work that deserves a place beside Paine's Rights of Man as a great document of the times. It does too much credit to American letters to be suffered to lie buried with a dead partisanship. It is warm with the humanitarian enthusiasm that was a common heritage from the Physiocratic school of social thinkers. Two suggestive ideas lie at the base of his thinking: the doctrine of the res publica, and the doctrine of social responsibility for individual well-being. The former, given wide currency by the Rights of Man, resulted from the imposition of social conscience on abstract political theory, out of which was derived a new conception of the duty and function of the political state—that the state must become an agent of the whole rather than the tool of a class, and that its true concern is the public thing, safeguarding the social heritage as a common asset to succeeding generations; the latter is a more specific inquiry into the relation of the political state to the individual citizen.…