day, memorable for
partisan abuse and for such bitter attacks on the administration that
Washington alluded to its editor as "that rascal Freneau." The paper
continued under Freneau until 1793, when he returned to New York for a
time.

[Illustration: Richmond Hill]

In those days of 1793 there were three or four detached houses in
Cedar Street close by Nassau. In the one nearest the corner, on any
day of the week a man, slender and tall, with eyes that were keen and
gray, with dress always in perfect taste, with broad-brimmed hat and
queue, could be seen. He came from this house and walked over to
Broadway, and his neighbors watched regularly for his going and his
coming. He was Noah Webster, editor of _The Minerva_, a paper at that
time devoted to the support of President Washington's administration.
His name was to become a household word, for his paper became the
_Commercial Advertiser_ (that lived and throve even in the twentieth
century), and after he had left the city he wrote a world-famed
dictionary.

The poetic muse hovered closest about Philip Freneau in the days of
stirring scenes and momentous events. The Poet of the Revolution was
less active when quieter days came. Still he continued to pass a life
of restless energy, and lived far into another century and long after
many another writer had arisen to eclipse him in the literary life of
New York.

Chapter IV

In the Days of Thomas Paine

When the eighteenth century was within two years of its close, a group
of men, perhaps half a dozen in all, made up the writers of New York.

The city then lay between the park (a name that had just been bestowed
upon the Common of old) and the Battery; with Broadway, the main
thoroughfare of the town, sending out tendrils of narrow streets to
tangle and turn about themselves in such persistent fashion that they
were never to be straightened out. Quite abruptly, where the park
began, Broadway dwindled from a street to a lane, but with a strong
branch thoroughfare to the east which, with the advent of years, was
to become Park Row. It was not a new thoroughfare by any means, since,
as far back as the days of the Dutch Governors, it had been the one
road that led up through the forested island.

There faced the road, and so quite of necessity faced the park as
well, a square building, its front so taken up with windows and doors
as to cause wonder that there should be any pretence whatsoever of a
front wa