and he took heed, as Rogers seems not to have done, of the risk he was running in entering the perilous straits of political controversy in which "Ponteach" was stranded before it had reached the theater: O, may no party spirit blast his views, Or turn to ill the meanings of the Muse; She sings of wrongs long past, Men as they were, To instruct, without reproach, the Men that are; Then judge the Story by the genius shown, And praise, or damn it, for its worth alone. Party feeling was high at the time over the opposing claims of France and England--"The Rival Suitors for America," as Freneau called them in his verses of 1795. "Hail Columbia," by Joseph Hopkinson, made an immediate hit when sung at an actors' benefit less than four weeks after the production of "André," and made it by an appeal to broad national feeling. And Dunlap, after a slip of sentiment in the first performance, kept clear of politics, and showed tact as well as daring by making the Briton heroic, though a spy, and by his fine treatment of the unnamed "General," who was evidently Washington. Dunlap's play showed a ready appreciation of theatrical effectiveness. It was the work of a playmaker rather than a poet, and the verse had none of the elevation of Godfrey's or Rogers's. It was far better than the declamatory stage efforts of the Revolutionary years by Brackenridge, Leacock, Low, and Mercy Warren, and it was the best early specimen of the historical romance for which there is always a ready patronage. Dunlap is more significant as an all-round man in the early history of the American theater than as a pure dramatist. He was a good judge of what the public wanted, and fairly able to achieve it. What he could not write he could translate or adapt. He turned Schiller's "Don Carlos" into English, and it failed; but he made a great success of Zschokke's "Abaellino" and translated no less than thirteen plays of Kotzebue. A comic opera, a dramatic satire, a farce, or an interlude seemed all one to him in point of ease or difficulty. From 1796 to 1803 he produced more than four plays a year under his own management at the Park Theater in New York. He continued as a manager till 1805 and was connected with the theater again in 1810-1811. Finally, to cap all, in 1832 he published in two volumes his "History of the American Theater," which, though inaccurate in many details, is full of the personal recollections of men and events that no amount of exact scholarship could now unearth.