Where round yon mouldering oak vain brambles twine,
The filial stem, already towering high,
Erelong shall stretch his arms and nod in yonder sky.”
From these specimens of President Dwight’s poetry any critic, familiar with the time, could infer that his prose was sensible and sound. One of the few books of travel which will always retain value for New Englanders was written by President Dwight to describe his vacation rambles; and although in his own day no one would have ventured to insult him by calling these instructive volumes amusing, the quaintness which here and there gave color to the sober narrative had a charm of its own. How could the contrast be better expressed between volatile Boston and orthodox New Haven than in Dwight’s quiet reproof, mixed with paternal tenderness? The Bostonians, he said, were distinguished by a lively imagination, ardor, and sensibility; they were “more like the Greeks than the Romans;” admired where graver people would only approve; applauded or hissed where another audience would be silent; their language was frequently hyperbolical, their pictures highly colored; the tea shipped to Boston was destroyed,—in New York and Philadelphia it was stored; education in Boston was superficial, and Boston women showed the effects of this misfortune, for they practised accomplishments only that they might be admired, and were taught from the beginning to regard their dress as a momentous concern.
Under Dwight’s rule the women of the Connecticut Valley were taught better; but its men set to the Bostonians an example of frivolity without a parallel, and they did so with the connivance of President Dwight and under the lead of his brother Theodore. The frivolity of the Hartford wits, as they were called, was not so light as that of Canning and the “Anti-Jacobin,” but had it been heavier than the “Conquest of Canaan” itself, it would still have found no literary rivalry in Boston. At about the time when Dwight composed his serious epic, another tutor at Yale, John Trumbull, wrote a burlesque epic in Hudibrastic verse, “McFingal,” which his friend Dwight declared to be not inferior to “Hudibras” in wit and humor, and in every other respect superior. When “Hudibras” was published, more than a hundred years before, Mr. Pepys remarked: “It hath not a good liking in me, though I had tried but twice or three times reading to bring myself to think it witty.” After the lapse of more than another century, the humor of neither poem may seem worth imitation; but to Trumbull in 1784 Butler was a modern classic, for the standard of taste between 1663 and 1784 changed less than in any twenty years of the following century. “McFingal” was a success, and laid a solid foundation for the coming school of Hartford wits. Posterity ratified the verdict of Trumbull’s admirers by preserving for daily use a few of his lines quoted indiscriminately with Butler’s best:—
“What has posterity done for us?”
“Optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen.”
“A thief ne’er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law.”