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Although Freneau's best poems are few and short, no preceding American poet
had equaled them. The following will repay careful reading: _The Wild
Honeysuckle_, _The Indian Burying Ground_, and _To a Honey Bee_.
He died in 1832, and was buried near his home at Mount Pleasant, Monmouth
County, New Jersey.
ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE PERIOD
The great prose representatives of the first half of the eighteenth
century, Swift, Addison, Steele, and Defoe, had passed away before the
middle of the century. The creators of the novel, Samuel Richardson and
Henry Fielding, had done their best work by 1750.
The prose writers of the last half of the century were OLIVER GOLDSMITH
(1728-1774), who published the _Vicar of Wakefield_ in 1766; EDWARD GIBBON
(1737-1794), who wrote _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_; EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797), best known to-day for his _Speech on
Conciliation with America_; and SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784), whose _Lives of
the Poets_ is the best specimen of eighteenth-century classical criticism.
The most noteworthy achievement of the century was the victory of
romanticism (p. 88) over classicism.
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