Gaine was an Irishman who published the New York Mercury, and changed his politics to whichever side was uppermost—Whig to-day, Tory to-morrow. He printed Freneau's satires against Great Britain as a Whig, and then as a Tory fell under the power of Freneau's pen, for Freneau hated inconstancy quite as much as he did Tory principles.
Then there was close at hand the home of Rivington's New York Gazetteer. This Rivington, failing as a bookseller in London, planted his sign in Hanover Square and proudly proclaimed himself as the only London bookseller in America. He established his Tory newspaper, the New York Gazetteer, and had it wrecked by patriots, who threw the furniture out into Hanover Square and moulded the type into bullets. It was he who printed the poems of André; who after the war gave up a Tory paper and was strong for the cause of the new nation and was in consequence denounced by Freneau.
Freneau smiled to see the signs of Gaine and Rivington changed to suit the views of the new republic and rivalling one another in their show of patriotism. Tempted into Gaine's bookstore by the display of volumes, he chanced upon a friend who called him by name. And old Hugh Gaine, turning slowly about at the sound of a name he knew so well, stared at the enemy he had never seen:
"Is your name Freneau?" he asked. And the poet answered:
"Yes, Philip Freneau."
For just a moment the bookseller hesitated, then said:
"I want to shake your hand; you have given me and my friend Rivington a lasting reputation."
It was in one of these very bookstores that Freneau met Lindley Murray in the year after the peace was declared. From their first meeting the two were friends. Murray had accumulated a fortune as a salt merchant on Long Island during the British occupation. Strong patriot as Freneau was, he was attracted to the son at first through the memory of the parent, for it was Lindley Murray's mother, living on Murray Hill, who had saved Putnam's troops from being trapped by the British. The friendship of Freneau and Lindley Murray might have ripened, but that in the year after their meeting Murray went to England, where he was to devote himself, for his own amusement, to horticulture, in a pretty little garden beside his home near York, and where he wrote his famous grammar for a young ladies' school.
