The leading figure in the Knickerbocker school was Fitz-Greene Halleck, who was born in Connecticut in 1790 but spent his active life in New York. When he came up to the city, at the age of twenty-one, he fell in with the literary people of the town and shared their eager interest in the current English output. According to his biographer they were absorbed in "The Lady of the Lake" and "Marmion," in Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," Rogers's "Pleasures of Memory," Moore's "Melodies," Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs" and "Thaddeus of Warsaw," and, a little later, in "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," and "The Antiquary"--works that in Halleck's opinion produced "a wide-spread enthusiasm throughout Great Britain and this country which has probably never been equalled in the history of literature." Halleck (as already cited on page 113) was uncomfortably conscious of the prosaic commercial drive of American life and disposed to lament the wane of romance. His regret for the passage of "the good old days" he frequently expressed in the poems he wrote between the ages of twenty-five and thirty--"Alnwick Castle," "Red-Jacket," "A Sketch," "A Poet's Daughter"; and in "Wyoming" he sometimes grieved for the old and sometimes protested at the new. When in 1823 he wrote "Marco Bozzaris," he lived up to his own thesis, taking an heroic episode of immediate interest--August 20, 1823--and putting it into a ballad for freedom that has probably been declaimed as often as "The Charge of the Light Brigade" or "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." In the meanwhile he had become the intimate of the talented young Joseph Rodman Drake. Their friendship had sprung from a common love of romantic poetry, but the joint work which they undertook was a series of contemporary satires. These were printed in _The National Advocate_ and the New York _Evening Post_ between March and July, 1819. Thirty-five of them appeared over the signature of "Croaker," from which they became known as the "Croaker Papers." They were both pertinent and impertinent, aided by the mystery of their authorship and accumulating in interest through the uncertainty as to when the next would appear and whom it would assail. The more general in theme had the same underlying good sense which belonged to the earlier _Salmagundis_ (see p. 116), and in their simple and often brutal directness they must have offered then, as they do now, a relief from the fashionable echoes of secondary English poets. Later in 1819 Halleck resumed the same strain in "Fanny"--the account in about a thousand lines of the rise and fall of Fanny and her father in New York finance and society.[11] Among many efforts of the sort Stedman's "Diamond Wedding" and Butler's "Nothing to Wear" have been the only later approach, and all have been true not merely of New York but of the same stage in most quick-growing American cities.