[5] "It is true that Mr. Jefferson has pronounced the poems of Phillis Wheatley below the dignity of criticism, and it is seldom safe to differ in judgment from the author of 'Notes on Virginia,' but her conceptions are often lofty, and her versification often surprises with unexpected refinement. Ladd, the Carolina poet, in enumerating the laurels of his country, dwells with encomium on 'Wheatley's polished verse;' nor is his praise undeserved, for often it will be found to glide in the stream of melody. Her lines on imagination have been quoted with rapture by Imlay, of Kentucky, and Steadman, the Guiana traveller, but I have ever thought her happiest production the 'Goliah of Gath'" (John Davis, p. 87). Paine himself printed some virile verses in the magazine, notably the lines "On the Death of Wolfe" (though not published for the first time), signed "Atlanticus," "Reflections on the Death of Clive," and "The Liberty Tree." Bradford's magazines had failed because of the imperfect communication between the colonies. Aitken's magazine, throughout its life of eighteen months, is overshadowed by the war, and the grave news successively reported from both sides of the ocean. The next Philadelphia editor was the eccentric social wit, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the author of the capital political satire, "Modern Chivalry" (1792), the first satirical novel written in America. He was a native of Scotland, born in 1748, but was only five years of age when his father settled in York County, Pennsylvania. He was graduated from Princeton College in 1771, in the same class with Philip Freneau, in conjunction with whom he delivered, at the commencement, a poem in dialogue upon "The Rising Glory of America," which was published by Robert Aitken in 1772. Francis Bailey was the publisher who had the courage to undertake another monthly magazine in the midst of the war, and with Brackenridge as editor, which insured some pungent writing, he issued in January, 1779, the first number of "_The United States Magazine_; a Repository of History, Politics and Literature." "Our attempt," said the editor, "is to paint the graces on the front of war, and _invite the muses to our country_." This, it will be noticed, is the second express invitation to the Maids of Parnassus to "migrate from Greece and Ionia," and to "cross out those immensely overpaid accounts." The first was extended during the French and Indian war, and the second in the very aim and flash of the Revolution. That the muses did not immediately accept the invitation, and "placard 'Removed' and 'To Let' on the rocks of their snowy Parnassus," we are reminded by the opening lines of the "Epistle to W. Gifford," written by another Philadelphia poet, William Cliffton, at the very close of the century.[6] [6] William Cliffton (1772-1799) was the son of a blacksmith in Southwark. His poem "The Group" (1793) was written in ridicule of the Commissioners of Southwark.