Eying each fault, to all perfection blind,
Shedding the taint of a malignant mind?
No indelible lines divide social satire from literary satire on the one side and from political on the other; but it is perhaps closer to the latter than to the former. Rather toward political than toward social satire have American wits been more often attracted. No chapters in the late Professor Moses Coit Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution are more interesting or more illuminating than those in which he considers the pungent verses of the rival bards who attacked the British cause, or who denounced the American, during the years that followed the breach with England. And it is to be noted that although the best known of all the Revolutionary satirists—Freneau especially, whom Tyler terms a "poet of hatred rather than of love"—were on the right side, yet the other party was not without its share of rhymesters having an apt command of epigram and an ample supply of invective. For example, Dr. Jonathan Odell, who served as chaplain to the Loyalist troops, published in 1779 and 1780 four brief satires which have pith and point, and even a certain individuality of their own, although obviously imitating the method and manner of Dryden and of Pope. There is vigor in these verses:
Was Samuel Adams to become a ghost,
Another Adams would assume his post;
Was bustling Hancock numbered with the dead,
Another full as wise might raise his head.
What if the sands of Laurens now were run,
How should we miss him—has he not a son?
Or what if Washington should close his scene,
Could none succeed him? Is there not a Greene?
Knave after knave as easy could we join,
As new emissions of the paper coin.
But nothing produced on the Tory side has half the broad humor and the pertinent wit of Trumbull's "McFingal," published in part in 1776 and completed in 1782. Trumbull's immediate model is obviously "Hudibras"; but he had found his profit in a study of Churchill as well as of Butler. Yet "McFingal" is no mere imitation, or else it would have gone the swift way of all other imitations. As Professor Trent has justly remarked, Trumbull's mock epic "shows a wide and digested knowledge of the classics and of the better English poets; and while it lacks the variety and inexhaustible wit of Butler's performance, it is in many passages hardly inferior to that in pointedness and in its command of the Hudibrastic verse-form." In the minting of couplets destined to proverbial currency, Trumbull has often the felicity of Butler; and some of his sayings have had the strange fortune of ascription to the satire upon which his was modelled. For example:
No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law.
And again:
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen.
Trumbull has also not a little of Butler's daring ingenuity in the devising of novel rhymes:
Behold! the world shall stare at new sets
Of home-made earls in Massachusetts.
After the Revolution, and before the Constitution gave to the scarcely United States the firm government which the nation needed, during what the late John Fiske aptly called "the critical period of American history," Trumbull joined with others of the little group known as the "Hartford Wits" in a satire called the "Anarchiad," published in 1786-7, in which faction was denounced in scathing terms:
Stand forth, ye traitors, at your country's bar,
Inglorious authors of intestine war,
What countless mischiefs from their labors rise!
Pens dipped in gall, and lips inspired with lies!
Ye sires of ruin, prime detested cause
Of bankrupt faith, annihilated laws,
Of selfish systems, jealous, local schemes,
And unvoiced empire lost in empty dreams;
Your names, expanding with your growing crime,
Shall float disgustful down the stream of time;
Each future age applaud the avenging song,
And outraged nature vindicate the wrong.
