His temperament was Celtic. He inherited with his French blood a passionate love for beauty, a sensuous, dreamy delight in the merely poetic, in the weird and romantic. He had not the Teutonic stability; he was easily exalted, easily depressed; he went often to extremes; he was sensitive to a degree that made criticism a torture, and he was proud beyond all reason. He had been deeply touched by the principles of the Revolution; he had suffered personally at the hands of the enemy; he had followed Paine in his democratic doctrines even to the extremes, and he tried to live consistently with these exalted ideals. His honesty and his ignorance of the world prevented him from seeing how greatly these principles must be modified to become of really practical value. His kindly heart made him a fierce foe to all kinds of tyranny and oppression. He saw sights in the West Indies that made him a bitter opponent of human slavery. Again and again in his poems and prose sketches does he condemn the evil. His message is almost as intense as Whittier's: "O come the time and haste the day When man shall man no longer crush, When reason shall enforce her sway, Nor these fair regions raise the blush Where still the African complains And mourns his yet unbroken chains." Not only slavery, but every other form of oppression and wrong received his condemnation. He wrote boldly against intemperance in a day when the use of intoxicating liquors was well-nigh universal and wholly uncriticised; he spoke eloquently on cruelty to animals; and he was one of the earliest to demand equal rights for man and woman. Freneau's religious inclinations have been sometimes harshly criticised by those of puritanic creed. The school of Dr. Dwight could speak of him only in contempt, yet it is true that the poet was a deeply religious man. His love of freedom and his perfect sincerity affected his creed. He had an intense dislike for hollow formalism. In his "Jamaica Funeral" he has pictured a hypocritical priest in colors as vivid almost as Chaucer's. He detested "The holy man by Bishops holy made." He loved sincerity, and the creed that came not from dry formalism, but from reason and from an honest heart. It has often been overlooked by his critics that Freneau was a widely read and thoroughly cultured man; that he was a linguist of more than ordinary powers; and that he knew intimately the chief writings in Latin, Italian, French, and English. He was no ignorant, careless scribbler, tossing into the ephemeral columns of the press hasty rhymes of which he never thought again. He revised and corrected with patient care, and he took a deep interest in the children of his pen, rescuing at one time or another almost every one of them from the oblivion of the newspaper. VIII.