arnassus.

Joel Barlow, "Virgilian Barlow," is the most remarkable of the cluster.
He started in the race of life with ten competitors of his own blood,
and came in a successful adventurer in both hemispheres. After serving
in the army with musket and prayer-book, he practised law, edited a
newspaper, kept a book-shop,--and having exhausted the variety of
callings offered by Connecticut, went to France as agent for the Scioto
Land Company, and opened an office in Paris with a grand flourish of
advertisements. "Farms for sale on the banks of the Ohio, _la belle
riviere_; the finest district of the United States! Healthful and
delightful climate; scarcely any frost in winter; fertile soil; a
boundless inland navigation; magnificent forests of a tree from which
sugar flows; excellent fishing and fowling; venison in abundance; no
wolves, lions, or tigers; no taxes; no military duty. All these
unexampled advantages offered to colonists at five shillings the acre!"
The speculation took well. Nothing was talked of but the free and rural
life to be led on the banks of the Scioto. Brissot's foolish book on
America confirmed the promises of Barlow, and stimulated the ardor of
purchasers.

The Scioto Company turned out to be a swindling land-company, the
precursor of many that have resembled it. The lands they offered had
been bought of the Ohio Company, but were never paid for. When the poor
French barbers, fiddlers, and bakers, as they are called in a
contemporary narrative, reached the banks of _la belle riviere_, they
found that their title-deeds were good for nothing, and that the woods
produced savages instead of sugar. Some died of privation, some were
scalped, and some found their way to New Orleans. The few who remained
eventually obtained a grant of a few acres from the Ohio Company, by
paying for them over again.

In the mean time the French Revolution had broken out, and Barlow saw
the visions and dreamed the dreams of the enthusiasts of that day. He
dropped the land business, and he dropped his New England prejudices,
religious as well as political, and his New England common sense.
Connecticut men who wander into other lands and other opinions seem
peculiarly subject to such violent transformations. Some of the most
ignivorous of our Southern countrymen are the offspring of Connecticut;
and, strange as it may appear, the sober land of the pumpkin and onion
exports more arbiters of elegance and punctilio, more judg