ho perpetuated the
Addisonian tradition later than any English writer. The influence of
Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the Parliamentary orators has already
been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope was dominant, so that we
find, for example, William Livingston, who became governor of New
Jersey and a member of the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem
on _Philosophic Solitude_ which reproduces the trick of Pope's
antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the _Rape of the Lock_, and
the didactic morality of the _Imitations_ from Horace and the _Moral
Essays_:

{381}

"Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms,
Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms;
To shining palaces let fools resort
And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court.
Mine be the pleasure of a rural life,
From noise remote and ignorant of strife,
Far from the painted belle and white-gloved beau,
The lawless masquerade and midnight show;
From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars,
Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars."

The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's
_McFingal_, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and in complete
shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more than thirty editions
in America, and was several times reprinted in England. _McFingal_ was
a satire in four cantos, directed against the American Loyalists, and
modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_. As
Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so
the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bon-fires of
the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill entreated,
and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The
poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery
and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains one of the best of American
political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many
imitations of _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some
of its lines, which {382} have passed into currency as proverbs, are
generally attributed to Butler. For example:

"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."

Or this:

"For any man with half an eye
What stands before him may espy;
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen."

Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own
countrymen, as