Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/200

174 at the close of the Revolution, shows that he could also write a true poem. Odell, whose satires were not only in the main longer and less original, but also more virulent, was the Freneau of the tory side. Though possessed of little humour and less wit, he is at least vigorous and incisive and can give Freneau as good as he sends:

Back to his mountains Washington may trot. He take this city? Yes—when ice is hot.

That Churchill was his model appears in his Feu de Joie; his Word of Congress (1779), four hundred lines of politico-personal invective against the Continental Congress; and in the still longer American Times (1780), which attacked the leaders of the American cause with extreme bitterness and scurrility.

After the Revolution and before the adoption of the Constitution, social and political unrest produced The Anarchiad, a Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night (1786-1787), in which four of the Hartford group, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, David Humphreys, and Lemuel Hopkins cleverly adapted their English original The Rolliad to the conditions that gave rise to Shays's Rebellion, paper money, demagogy, and other evils of the time. The Anarchiad is in 1200 lines of heroic couplets, and is divided into fourteen parts that purport to be extracts from an ancient epic, lately discovered, which foretell conditions in the decade following the Revolution. The verse is that of Pope and Goldsmith, from whom many passages are paraphrased; the style is a parody of Homer, Dante, Milton, and Pope; and the mock-heroic method is conventional; yet the satire through its wit and good sense deserved its immense popularity. The speech of Hesper in favour of a firm union of the states is fine and eloquent; and the brilliant satirical picture of the Land of Annihilation, though obviously suggested by The Dunciad, is not unworthy of its original.

The entire story of the strife between federalist and republican, Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, can be read in the verse satire of the time. No American shows this bitter partisanship more than Thomas Green Fessenden (1771-1837). His Terrible Tractoration, written in England about English conditions, is not political but is chiefly aimed at the critics of