One cannot help thinking of Butler's _Hudibras_ (1663), when reading _M'Fingal_. Of course the satiric aim is different in the two poems. Butler ridiculed the Puritans and upheld the Royalists, while Trumbull discharged his venomed shafts at the adherents of the king. In _M'Fingal_, a Tory bent on destroying a liberty pole drew his sword on a Whig, who had no arms except a spade. The Whig, however, employed his weapon with such good effect on the Tory that:-- "His bent knee fail'd, and void of strength, Stretch'd on the ground his manly length. Like ancient oak, o'erturn'd, he lay, Or tower to tempests fall'n a prey, Or mountain sunk with all his pines, Or flow'r the plough to dust consigns, And more things else--but all men know 'em, If slightly versed in epic poem." Some of the incisive lines from _M'Fingal_ have been wrongly ascribed to Butler's _Hudibras_. The following are instances:-- "No man e'er felt the halter draw With good opinion of the law." "For any man with half an eye What stands before him may espy; But optics sharp it needs, I ween, To see what is not to be seen." Trumbull's _M'Fingal_ is a worthy predecessor of Lowell's _Biglow Papers_. Trumbull wrote his poem as a "weapon of warfare." The first part of _M'Fingal_ passed through some forty editions, many of them printed without the author's consent. This fact is said to have led Connecticut to pass a copyright law in 1783, and to have thus constituted a landmark in American literary history. PHILIP FRENEAU, 1752-1832 [Illustration: PHILIP FRENEAU] New York City was the birthplace of Freneau, the greatest poet born in America before the Revolutionary War. He graduated at Princeton in 1771, and became a school teacher, sea captain, poet, and editor. The Revolution broke out when he was a young man, and he was moved to write satiric poetry against the British. Tyler says that "a running commentary on his Revolutionary satires would be an almost complete commentary on the whole Revolutionary struggle; nearly every important emergency and phase of which are photographed in his keen, merciless, and often brilliant lines." In one of these satires Freneau represents Jove investigating the records of Fate:-- "And first on the top of a column he read-- Of a king with a mighty soft place in his head, Who should join in his temper the ass and the mule, The Third of his name and by far the worst fool." We can imagine the patriotic colonists singing as a refrain:-- "... said Jove with a smile, Columbia shall never be ruled by an isle," or this:-- "The face of the Lion shall then become pale, He shall yield fifteen teeth and be sheared of his tail," but Freneau's satiric verse is not his best, however important it may be to historians. His best poems are a few short lyrics, remarkable for their simplicity, sincerity, and love of nature. His lines:--