party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by crowds in the
streets, and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater;
for by this time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and
even in Puritanic Boston. Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the
_Star Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis
Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort
McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the
once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_,
recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society.
The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it
is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was a young
Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the old Federal
Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794. His
name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the
Massachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded
with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile
in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for
liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or consigned to
the limbo of Duyckinck's _Cyclopedia_ and Griswold's _Poets of
America_. Here and there a line has, by accident, survived to do {390}
duty as a motto or inscription, while all its context is buried in
oblivion. Few have read any thing more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for
example, than the couplet,

"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours,"

taken from his _Epilogue to Cato_, written in 1778.

Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau; "that rascal Freneau,"
as Washington called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his
administration in Freneau's _National Gazette_. He was of Huguenot
descent, was a classmate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken
prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over,
engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the
Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now
unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by
virtue of his _Wild Honeysuckle_, _Indian Burying Ground_, _Indian
Student_, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and
delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood.

Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets"