Trumbull's M'Fingal is a worthy predecessor of Lowell's Biglow Papers. Trumbull wrote his poem as a "weapon of warfare." The first part of M'Fingal passed through some forty editions, many of them printed without the author's consent. This fact is said to have led Connecticut to pass a copyright law in 1783, and to have thus constituted a landmark in American literary history.
PHILIP FRENEAU, 1752-1832
[Illustration: PHILIP FRENEAU]
New York City was the birthplace of Freneau, the greatest poet born in America before the Revolutionary War. He graduated at Princeton in 1771, and became a school teacher, sea captain, poet, and editor.
The Revolution broke out when he was a young man, and he was moved to write satiric poetry against the British. Tyler says that "a running commentary on his Revolutionary satires would be an almost complete commentary on the whole Revolutionary struggle; nearly every important emergency and phase of which are photographed in his keen, merciless, and often brilliant lines." In one of these satires Freneau represents Jove investigating the records of Fate:—
"And first on the top of a column he read—
Of a king with a mighty soft place in his head,
Who should join in his temper the ass and the mule,
The Third of his name and by far the worst fool."
We can imagine the patriotic colonists singing as a refrain:—
"… said Jove with a smile, Columbia shall never be ruled by an isle,"
or this:—
"The face of the Lion shall then become pale,
He shall yield fifteen teeth and be sheared of his tail,"