Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1 (wikilinked).djvu/136

1800. and published in the most democratic community of America. "Modern Chivalry" told the adventures of a militia captain, who riding about the country with a raw Irish servant, found this red-headed, igno­rant bog-trotter, this Sancho Panza, a much more popular person than himself, who could only with diffi­culty be restrained from becoming a clergyman, an Indian chief, a member of the legislature, of the phi­losophical society, and of Congress. At length his employer got for him the appointment of excise offi­cer in the Alleghanies, and was gratified at seeing him tarred and feathered by his democratic friends. "Modern Chivalry" was not only written in good last-century English, none too refined for its subject, but was more thoroughly American than any book yet published, or to be published until the "Letters of Major Jack Downing" and the "Georgia Scenes" of forty years later. Never known, even by title, in Europe, and little enjoyed in the seaboard States, where bog-trotters and weavers had no such prom­inence, Judge Brackenridge's book filled the place of Don Quixote on the banks of the Ohio and along the Mississippi.

Another man whose literary merits were not to be overlooked, had drifted to Philadelphia because of its varied attractions. If in the last century America could boast of a poet who shared some of the delicacy if not the grandeur of genius, it was Philip Freneau; whose verses, poured out for the occasion, ran freely, good and bad, but the bad, as was natural, much more