his followers. They think that, with age, the Croakers will acquire a greater value,—that a hundred years hence they will be more appreciated than they are now.
In regard to the oft-repeated saying that these are only local satires, I may observe, that all satire, to be effective, must be directed at individuals, and individuals in particular localities. There are scores of satires launched against abstractions,—an Ode to Avarice here, a satire against Ambition there, and so forth. But Junius, and Swift, and Butler, and Dryden, Pope and Burns, and Byron and Churchill, selected their victims from living men, and preserved their otherwise anonymous names in an immortality of damnation.
It is the divine mission of the poet to give
“to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.”
The solitary traveller upon the frontiers of civilization,—in Montana, or Colorado,—approaches a log-cabin; and from the sound of voices within it, he learns, perhaps for the first time, that there is a river in Scotland called the “Doon,” which he never would have known, if Burns had not written of its bonny banks and braes. I wish we had some local poets,—that could tell us of Powles’ Hook, and Washington Heights, and Stony Point, and all the glorious points of historical interest on the Hudson.
“Vainly had Concord mourned its early dead,
Vainly had Charlestown burned and Warren bled,
Or Guilford’s loss, or Trenton’s capture been;
Eutaw’s red flood; or Monmouth’s trampled green:
