of North
America. The first pamphlet that Carey published in Ireland was a
treatise on duelling. Soon after his arrival in America he gave a
practical illustration of the text by engaging in a duel with Colonel
Oswald, in which he received a wound that stayed him at home for more
than a year.

_The American Museum_ was the first magazine in Philadelphia to reflect
faithfully the internal state of America. Bradford's magazines,
intensely loyal, looked across the ocean and saw little at home worthy
of record. Paine and Brackenridge expended their erratic genius in
abusive satire upon the Tories; the _Columbian Magazine_ avoided the
serious political problems of the times, and granted much of its space
to agricultural improvements and the beginnings of manufactures.

In almost every page, however, of the _Museum_ the reader catches
glimpses of the anxieties and disorders of the critical years of party
strife that attended the making and adoption of the Constitution. The
social order was weak, there was a general revolt against taxation. "I
am uneasy and apprehensive, more so than during the war," wrote Jay to
Washington, June 27, 1786. David Humphreys, one of the "Hartford Wits,"
who came into prominence at the close of the war, and who at this time
(1786) was engaged in the composition of the _Anarchiad_ and other
satirical verse, aimed at the disorder of the time, contributed to _The
Museum_ his poem on the "Happiness of America." Francis Hopkinson's
gentle prose satires and his poems of revolutionary incidents reappeared
in its pages. Anthony Benezet uttered his oft-repeated protest against
the iniquity of slavery. Philip Freneau's odes found place almost
monthly in the poet's corner. Through several numbers ran a series of
articles, though not for the first time published, "On the Character of
Philadelphians," signed Tamoc Caspipina, the pseudonym of the Rev. Jacob
Duche, brother-in-law of Francis Hopkinson, and derived from the initial
letters of his title as "the assistant minister of Christ's Church and
St. Peter's in Philadelphia, in North America."

I cull from volume five a few specimen articles to illustrate the wealth
of local and national history embedded in this popular periodical:

VOL. V, p. 185.--Report on the petition of Hallam and Henry to license a
theatre in Philadelphia.

P. 197.--Account of the battle of Bunker Hill.

P. 220.--Letters of "James Littlejohn"--_i.e._, Timothy Dwight.

P. 233.--F