Under Dwight’s rule the women of the Connecticut Valley were taught better; but its men set to the Bostonians an example of frivolity without a parallel, and they did so with the connivance of President Dwight and under the lead of his brother Theodore. The frivolity of the Hartford wits, as they were called, was not so light as that of Canning and the “Anti-Jacobin,” but had it been heavier than the “Conquest of Canaan” itself, it would still have found no literary rivalry in Boston. At about the time when Dwight composed his serious epic, another tutor at Yale, John Trumbull, wrote a burlesque epic in Hudibrastic verse, “McFingal,” which his friend Dwight declared to be not inferior to “Hudibras” in wit and humor, and in every other respect superior. When “Hudibras” was published, more than a hundred years before, Mr. Pepys remarked: “It hath not a good liking in me, though I had tried but twice or three times reading to bring myself to think it witty.” After the lapse of more than another century, the humor of neither poem may seem worth imitation; but to Trumbull in 1784 Butler was a modern classic, for the standard of taste between 1663 and 1784 changed less than in any twenty years of the following century. “McFingal” was a success, and laid a solid foundation for the coming school of Hartford wits. Posterity ratified the verdict of Trumbull’s admirers by preserving for daily use a few of his lines quoted indiscriminately with Butler’s best:-- “What has posterity done for us?” “Optics sharp it needs, I ween, To see what is not to be seen.” “A thief ne’er felt the halter draw With good opinion of the law.” Ten years after the appearance of “McFingal,” and on the strength of its success, Trumbull, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, Theodore Dwight, Joel Barlow, and others began a series of publications, “The Anarchiad,” “The Echo,” “The Guillotine,” and the like, in which they gave tongue to their wit and sarcasm. As Alsop described the scene,-- “Begrimed with blood where erst the savage fell, Shrieked the wild war-whoop with infernal yell, The Muses sing; lo, Trumbull wakes the lyre. . . . . . . . Majestic Dwight, sublime in epic strain, Paints the fierce horrors of the crimson plain; And in Virgilian Barlow’s tuneful lines With added splendor great Columbus shines.”