as he toiled and richly earned his gains,
Ruined his fingers and spun out his brains
To acquire the right to ope his ponderous jaws,
As the great champion of Sedition's cause.
Once his soft words like streams of melted tar
Stuck in our cars and led us on to war;
But now we hear the self-same accents flow
Unmoved as quails when buried up in snow.
Is his voice weak? That dreadful voice, we're told,
Once made King George the Third through fear turn cold,
Europa's kingdoms to their centre shake,
When mighty Samuel bawl'd at Freedom's stake.

* * * * *

Does his hand shake? When Sam cried out for war
His potent hand spread many a coat of tar,
That sinewy hand the feathers scattered o'er
Till Tories' jackets made their bellies sore.
Say, for whose sake has Time, that Barber gruff,
O'er his wise noddle shook his powder puff?
Was the task hard to hear the sage's noise?
Perhaps the awful sound had frightened boys;
But we, the sons of wisdom, fond to hear,
With joy had held the breath and oped the ear.
Did we e'en doubt that Solomon had spoke?
If so, has memory vanished into smoke."

The most of the succeeding numbers had reference to politics, but room
was found for excursions in other fields: "Monier's Advertisement for a
School," and "Newtonian Philosophy," served as pegs from which to hang
rhymed jests, and the writers would very likely have taken a wider range
if there had been a wider range in public interests. But politics
dominated thought, and the wits were as bitter partisans as they were
clever rhymesters. The poetry of the anti-Jacobin supplied them with the
suggestion of form; but there was not the lightness of touch or deft
mimicry which characterized those remarkable political skits. As one
reads the "Echo," and the "Green-house," and Trumbull's "McFingal," he
is constantly reminded of the heaviness of the education which formed
the substance of the writers' preparation for their task. The rudeness
of the satire is the rudeness of a homespun society.

The authors of the "Echo," when the series came to be reissued in a
volume, provided a somewhat solemn preface, in which they say: "The
principal poems in this volume, under the title of the 'Echo,' owed
their origin to the accidental suggestion of a moment of literary
sportiveness, at a time when pedantry, affectation, and bombast pervaded
most of the pieces published in the ga