Ten years after the appearance of “McFingal,” and on the strength of its success, Trumbull, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, Theodore Dwight, Joel Barlow, and others began a series of publications, “The Anarchiad,” “The Echo,” “The Guillotine,” and the like, in which they gave tongue to their wit and sarcasm. As Alsop described the scene,—
“Begrimed with blood where erst the savage fell,
Shrieked the wild war-whoop with infernal yell,
The Muses sing; lo, Trumbull wakes the lyre.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Majestic Dwight, sublime in epic strain,
Paints the fierce horrors of the crimson plain;
And in Virgilian Barlow’s tuneful lines
With added splendor great Columbus shines.”
Perhaps the Muses would have done better by not interrupting the begrimed savage; for Dwight, Trumbull, Alsop, and Hopkins, whatever their faults, were Miltonic by the side of Joel Barlow. Yet Barlow was a figure too important in American history to be passed without respectful attention. He expressed better than any one else that side of Connecticut character which roused at the same instant the laughter and the respect of men. Every human influence twined about his career and lent it interest; every forward movement of his time had his sympathy, and few steps in progress were made which he did not assist. His ambition, above the lofty ambition of Jefferson, made him aspire to be a Connecticut Mæcenas and Virgil in one; to patronize Fulton and employ Smirke; counsel Jefferson and contend with Napoleon. In his own mind a figure such as the world rarely saw,—a compound of Milton, Rousseau, and the Duke of Bridgewater,—he had in him so large a share of conceit, that tragedy, which would have thrown a solemn shadow over another man’s life, seemed to render his only more entertaining. As a poet, he undertook to do for his native land what Homer had done for Greece and Virgil for Rome, Milton for England and Camoens for Portugal,—to supply America with a great epic, without which no country could be respectable; and his “Vision of Columbus,” magnified afterward into the “Columbiad,” with a magnificence of typography and illustration new to the United States, remained a monument of his ambition. In this vision Columbus was shown a variety of coming celebrities, including all the heroes of the Revolutionary War:—