The expedition of the year 1777, under the command of Sir William Howe, resulted in considerable temporary disaster to the American cause. Nevertheless, it was this very expedition, so full of prosperity for the British, which in its sequel gave to Hopkinson the occasion for his most successful stroke as a humorous writer. Sir William, having gained a brief succession of victories, finding Philadelphia an agreeable place of repose, concluded to settle himself down in that city. The surrounding inhabitants, who had at first regarded him and his army with no little terror, soon came to regard both with some derision, and to conceive the idea of practising upon both certain experiments which had in them an element of covert mirthfulness, as it were. By a very imaginative and a very rollicking expansion of the actual facts of this small affair, Hopkinson was enabled to compose his celebrated ballad, _The Battle of the Kegs_. The actual facts of the case are as follows, according to his own later testimony in prose: “Certain machines, in the form of kegs, charged with gunpowder, were sent down the river to annoy the British shipping at Philadelphia. The danger of these machines being discovered, the British manned the wharfs and shipping, and discharged their small arms and cannons at everything they saw floating in the river during the ebb tide.” This jingling little story of _The Battle of the Kegs_--mere doggerel though it is--flew from colony to colony, and gave the weary and anxious people the luxury of genuine and hearty laughter in very scorn of the enemy. To the cause of the Revolution, it was perhaps worth as much, just then, by way of emotional tonic and of military inspiration, as the winning of a considerable battle would have been. From a literary point of view, _The Battle of the Kegs_ is very far from being the best of Hopkinson’s writings. Nevertheless, for its matter and its manner and for the adaptation of both to the immediate enjoyment of the multitude of readers, it became in his own day the best known of all its author’s productions, even as, since then, it is the only one that has retained any general remembrance in our literature. _Philip Freneau._--The work of Philip Freneau as poet and satirist in direct contact with the American Revolution was broken into two periods,--these periods being separated from each other by an interval of about two years. The first period embraces those months of the year 1775 wherein his own fierce passions, like the passions of his countrymen, were set aflame by the outbreak of hostilities. Thereafter occurred a mysterious lapse in his activity as a writer on themes connected with the great struggle to which he had professed his undying devotion;--he was absent from the country until some time in the year 1778. With the middle of the year 1778 began the second period of his work as Revolutionary poet and satirist, and it did not come to an end, except with the end of the Revolution itself.