The Friendly Club and Other PortraitsParsons, Francis
History
The Friendly Club and Other Portraits
Parsons, Francis
Authors, American; Hartford (Conn.) -- Biography
That particular sportive moment is still in the future. Now it is
sufficient for these younger men to shine in the reflected luster of the
established luminaries. These greater lights are worthy indeed of the
worship of the lesser stars. Three of them have achieved, or are soon to
acquire, an international as well as a national reputation. That
"M'Fingal" had provoked discussion in England has been noted.
Humphreys's "Address to the Armies of America," written in camp at
Peekskill, and dedicated to the Duke de Rochefoucault, was issued with
an introductory letter by the poet's friend, the Marquis de Chastellux,
in a French translation in Paris, after its publication in England where
the Monthly and Critical Reviews gave it a fair amount of praise, though
they could not refrain from the statement that the poem was "not a very
pleasing one to a good Englishman." Barlow's "Vision of Columbus" was
published almost simultaneously in Hartford and London in 1787.
In short these men had attained a genuine intellectual eminence in their
generation. They were the cognoscenti of their day. Like most young
intellectuals their gospel concerned itself with reform, with the
ridicule of shams, with the refusal to accept the popularity of new
doctrines as a final test of their value. Trumbull and Barlow, both Yale
graduates, had fought with their friend Timothy Dwight their first
reform campaign which was an effort to introduce into the somewhat
archaic and outworn body of the Yale curriculum the breath of the
humanities and of modern thought. Trumbull, according to Moses Coit
Tyler, was an example of a "new tone coming into American
letters--urbanity, perspective, moderation of emphasis, satire,
especially on its more playful side--that of irony."
Their interests were not only literary. They were publicists, political
satirists, social philosophers, not without their religious theories. In
all these matters their search was for the true standards and as
champions of causes and enthusiasts of ideals they exhibited a variation
from type in that their warfare was waged, not against the recognized
conventions in government, religion and society, but in favor of them.
Priding themselves on untrammelled and direct thinking, their reasoning
led them to support the established, the orderly, the stable.
Temperamentally aristocrats, theoretically republicans--in the broad
sense of the term--they were practically federalists. "The Anarchiad," a
series of poems they were contributing anonymously about this time to
"The New Haven Gazette," dealt satirically with the dangers of national
unrest and instability, of selfish aggrandizement and of a fictitious
currency. In these verses Hesper addresses "the Sages and Counsellors at
Philadelphia" as follows:
"But know, ye favor'd race, one potent head
Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread."
And in the same passage occur some lines, attributed to Hopkins, that
Daniel Webster may have read:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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