Not far from the city of Philadelphia, on the banks of the Schuylkill, lived William Bartram, the naturalist, whose “Travels” through Florida and the Indian country, published in 1791, were once praised by Coleridge, and deserved reading both for the matter and the style. Not far from Bartram, and his best scholar, was Alexander Wilson, a Scotch poet of more than ordinary merit, gifted with a dogged enthusiasm, which in spite of obstacles gave to America an ornithology more creditable than anything yet accomplished in art or literature. Beyond the mountains, at Pittsburg, another author showed genuine and original qualities. American humor was not then so marked as it afterward became, and good-nature was rarer; but H. H. Brackenridge set an example of both in a book once universally popular throughout the South and West. A sort of prose “Hudibras,” it had the merit of leaving no sting, for this satire on democracy was written by a democrat and published in the most democratic community of America. “Modern Chivalry” told the adventures of a militia captain, who riding about the country with a raw Irish servant, found this red-headed, ignorant bog-trotter, this Sancho Panza, a much more popular person than himself, who could only with difficulty be restrained from becoming a clergyman, an Indian chief, a member of the legislature, of the philosophical society, and of Congress. At length his employer got for him the appointment of excise officer in the Alleghanies, and was gratified at seeing him tarred and feathered by his democratic friends. “Modern Chivalry” was not only written in good last-century English, none too refined for its subject, but was more thoroughly American than any book yet published, or to be published until the “Letters of Major Jack Downing” and the “Georgia Scenes” of forty years later. Never known, even by title, in Europe, and little enjoyed in the seaboard States, where bog-trotters and weavers had no such prominence, Judge Brackenridge’s book filled the place of Don Quixote on the banks of the Ohio and along the Mississippi. Another man whose literary merits were not to be overlooked, had drifted to Philadelphia because of its varied attractions. If in the last century America could boast of a poet who shared some of the delicacy if not the grandeur of genius, it was Philip Freneau; whose verses, poured out for the occasion, ran freely, good and bad, but the bad, as was natural, much more freely than the good. Freneau proved his merit by an experience unique in history. He was twice robbed by the greatest English poets of his day. Among his many slight verses were some pleasing lines called “The Indian Burying Ground”:-- “His bow for action ready bent, And arrows with a head of stone, Can only mean that life is spent, And not the finer essence gone.