"
Some of the incisive lines from _M'Fingal_ have been wrongly ascribed to
Butler's _Hudibras_. The following are instances:--
"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."
"For any man with half an eye
What stands before him may espy;
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen."
Trumbull's _M'Fingal_ is a worthy predecessor of Lowell's _Biglow Papers_.
Trumbull wrote his poem as a "weapon of warfare." The first part of
_M'Fingal_ passed through some forty editions, many of them printed without
the author's consent. This fact is said to have led Connecticut to pass a
copyright law in 1783, and to have thus constituted a landmark in American
literary history.
PHILIP FRENEAU, 1752-1832
[Illustration: PHILIP FRENEAU]
New York City was the birthplace of Freneau, the greatest poet born in
America before the Revolutionary War. He graduated at Princeton in 1771,
and became a school teacher, sea captain, poet, and editor.
The Revolution broke out when he was a young man, and he was moved to write
satiric poetry against the British. Tyler says that "a running commentary
on his Revolutionary satires would be an almost complete commentary on the
whole Revolutionary struggle; nearly every important emergency and phase of
which are photographed in his keen, merciless, and often brilliant lines.
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