When party spirit runs high, satire is likely to be thriving. Political tension during the latter part of Washington’s presidency and during the administrations of Adams and Jefferson gave birth to a brood of satiric poems, many of them unacknowledged by their authors. Anonymous or otherwise, in most of them the writer’s pen was wielded as a bludgeon rather than a knife. Freneau himself was none too delicate in his censure of the government, although he ill deserved the reputation of a man lacking in love for his country; but Freneau was merely the most gifted among a number, more partisan than he, who, according as they were Federalists or Democrats, bitterly assailed the measures of the opposing faction. The “Democratiad” and the “Guillotina” were anonymous attacks in 1795 and 1796 upon the Democrats. William Cobbett, the Englishman, and Alexander Hamilton, whose private life offered an easy target, were pilloried as representatives of the Federalist party, in Carey’s “Porcupiniad” (1799) and a collection entitled “Olio” (1801). Nor was factional spleen unrelated to a variety of patriotic sentiment which displayed itself in verse for holidays and state occasions; but, like all the satires, most of the post-Revolutionary effusions of patriotism have long since ceased to excite emotion. As has been noted, Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia” (1798) is one of the exceptions. Colonel David Humphreys (1753-1818), a large part of whose verse amounted to eulogies on Washington, to the general public is hardly so much as a memory; and his intention “to make use of poetry for strengthening patriotism, promoting virtue, and extending happiness” has gone the way of many similar purposes of great excellence unaided by genius. _Washington Allston._--The first poet of distinction who evidently represents the tradition of Wordsworth was the artist Washington Allston (1779-1843), a friend of Coleridge, and declared by him to have a genius for literature and painting “unsurpassed by any man of his age.” Southey too was an enthusiastic admirer; and Wordsworth, who was chary of praise for the age in which he lived, commended the American painter ungrudgingly. In Allston’s “Sylphs of the Seasons” (1813) there is evidence of the exact eye of an artist, and there is much delicacy of sentiment and gentle play of fancy; but great constructive and imaginative vigour are not present, and a certain tameness in the rhymes and obviousness in the succession of thoughts serve to explain why the poem has not secured a more lasting recognition. His “America and Great Britain” was included by Coleridge in “Sibylline Leaves” (1817), “for its moral no less than its patriotic spirit.” As an attempt to incorporate in language the conception of abstract, so to speak, intellectual, beauty, “The Angel and the Nightingale” reminds one of Shelley.