After peace was declared, a number of these young writers came together again in Hartford, where they formed a sort of literary club with weekly meetings—“The Hartford Wits,” who for a few years made the little provincial capital the intellectual metropolis of the country. Trumbull had settled at Hartford in the practice of the law in 1781. Joel Barlow, who had hastily qualified for a chaplaincy in a Massachusetts brigade by a six weeks’ course of theology, and had served more or less sporadically through the war, came to Hartford in the year following and started a newspaper. David Humphreys, Yale 1771, illustrious founder of the Brothers in Unity Society, and importer of merino sheep, had enlisted in 1776 in a Connecticut militia regiment then on duty in New York. He had been on the staff of General Putnam, whose life he afterwards wrote; had been Washington’s aide and a frequent inmate at Mount Vernon from 1780 to 1783; then abroad (1784–1786), as secretary to the commission for making commercial treaties with the nations of Europe. (The commissioners were Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson.) On returning to his native Derby in 1786, he had been sent to the legislature at Hartford, and now found himself associated with Trumbull, who had entered upon his Yale tutorship in 1771, the year of Humphreys’s graduation; and with Barlow, who had taken his B.A. degree in 1778. These three Pleiades drew to themselves other stars of lesser magnitude, the most remarkable of whom was Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, a native of Waterbury, but since 1784 a practising physician at Hartford and one of the founders of the Connecticut Medical Society. Hopkins was an eccentric humorist, and is oddly described by Samuel Goodrich—“Peter Parley”—as “long and lank, walking with spreading arms and straddling legs.” “His nose was long, lean, and flexible,” adds Goodrich,—a description which suggests rather the proboscis of the elephant, or at least of the tapir, than a feature of the human countenance. Other lights in this constellation were Richard Alsop, from Middletown, who was now keeping a bookstore at Hartford, and Theodore Dwight, brother to Timothy and brother-in-law to Alsop, and later the secretary and historian of the famous Hartford Convention of 1814, which came near to carrying New England into secession. We might reckon as an eighth Pleiad, Dr. Elihu H. Smith, then residing at Wethersfield, who published in 1793 our first poetic miscellany, printed—of all places in the world—at Litchfield, “mine own romantic town”: seat of the earliest American law school, and emitter of this earliest American anthology. If you should happen to find in your garret a dusty copy of this collection, “American Poems, Original and Selected,” by Elihu H. Smith, hold on to it. It is worth money, and will be worth more.