Fire his full soul, and animate his lays.
Humphreys, in turn, in his poem “On the Future Glory of the United States of America,” calls upon his learned friends to string their lyres and rouse their countrymen against the Barbary corsairs who were holding American seamen in captivity:—
Why sleep’st thou, Barlow, child of genius? Why
See’st thou, blest Dwight, our land in sadness lie?
And where is Trumbull, earliest boast of fame?
’Tis yours, ye bards, to wake the smothered flame.
To you, my dearest friends, the task belongs
To rouse your country with heroic songs.
Yes, to be sure, where is Trumbull, earliest boast of fame? He came from Watertown (now a seat of learning), a cousin of Governor Trumbull—“Brother Jonathan”—and a second cousin of Colonel John Trumbull, the historical painter, whose battle pieces repose in the Yale Art Gallery. Cleverness runs in the Trumbull blood. There was, for example, J. Hammond Trumbull (abbreviated by lisping infancy to “J. Hambull”) in the last generation, a great sagamore—O a very big Indian,—reputed the only man in the country who could read Eliot’s Algonquin Bible. I make no mention of later Trumbulls known in letters and art. But as for our worthy, John Trumbull, the poet, it is well known and has been often told how he passed the college entrance examination at the age of seven, but forebore to matriculate till a more reasonable season, graduating in 1767 and serving two years as a tutor along with his friend Dwight; afterwards studying law at Boston in the office of John Adams, practising at New Haven and Hartford, filling legislative and judicial positions, and dying at Detroit in 1831.
Trumbull was the satirist of the group. As a young man at Yale, he amused his leisure by contributing to the newspapers essays in the manner of “The Spectator” (“The Meddler,” “The Correspondent,” and the like); and verse satires after the fashion of Prior and Pope. There is nothing very new about the Jack Dapperwits, Dick Hairbrains, Tom Brainlesses, Miss Harriet Simpers, and Isabella Sprightlys of these compositions. The very names will recall to the experienced reader the stock figures of the countless Addisonian imitations which sicklied o’er the minor literature of the eighteenth century. But Trumbull’s masterpiece was “M’Fingal,” a Hudibrastic satire on the Tories, printed in part at Philadelphia in 1776, and in complete shape at Hartford in 1782, “by Hudson and Goodwin near the Great Bridge.” “M’Fingal” was the most popular poem of the Revolution. It went through more than thirty editions in America and England. In 1864 it was edited with elaborate historical notes by Benson J. Lossing, author of “Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution.” A reprint is mentioned as late as 1881. An edition, in two volumes, of Trumbull’s poetical works was issued in 1820.