Among the humbler subscribers I am gratified to observe the names of Nathan Beers, merchant, New Haven; and Isaac Beers & Co., booksellers, New Haven (six copies),—no ancestors but conjecturally remote collateral relatives of the undersigned. I cannot undertake to quote from Humphreys’s poems. The patriotic feeling that prompted them was genuine; the descriptions of campaigns in which he himself had borne a part have a certain value; but the poetry as such, though by no means contemptible, is quite uninspired. Homer’s catalogue of ships is a hackneyed example of the way in which a great poet can make bare names poetical. Humphreys had a harder job, and passages of his battle pieces read like pages from a city directory. As fly autumnal leaves athwart some dale, Borne on the pinions of the sounding gale, Or glides the gossamer o’er rustling reeds, Bland’s, Sheldon’s, Moylan’s, Baylor’s battle steeds So skimmed the plain. . . . Then Huger, Maxwell, Mifflin, Marshall, Read, Hastened from states remote to seize the meed; * * * * * While Smallwood, Parsons, Shepherd, Irvine, Hand, Guest, Weedon, Muhlenberg, leads each his band. Does the modern reader recognize a forefather among these heroic patronymics? Just as good men as fought at Marathon or Agincourt. Nor can it be said of any one of them _quia caret vate sacro_. But the loudest blast upon the trump of fame was blown by Joel Barlow. It was agreed that in him America had produced a supreme poet. Born at Redding,—where Mark Twain died the other day,—the son of a farmer, Barlow was graduated at Yale in 1778—just a hundred years before President Taft. He married the daughter of a Guilford blacksmith, who had moved to New Haven to educate his sons; one of whom, Abraham Baldwin, afterwards went to Georgia, grew up with the country, and became United States Senator.