oods of the State:

"From Susquehanna's farthest springs,
Where savage tribes pursue their game
(His blanket tied with yellow strings),
A shepherd of the forest came."

Campbell "lifted"--in his poem _O'Conor's Child_--the last line of the
following stanza from Freneau's _Indian Burying Ground_:

"By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In vestments for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues--
The hunter and the deer, a shade."

And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in _Marmion_, the
final line of one of the stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw
Springs:

"They saw their injured country's woe,
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe,
They took the spear, but left the shield."

Scott inquired of an American gentleman who visited him the authorship
of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing
of the kind as there was in the language.

The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginning
during the period now under review. A company of English players came
to this country in 1762 and made the tour of many of the principal
towns. The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage
was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at
Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building was at
Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among
other pieces, Farquhar's _Beaux' Stratagem_. In 1753 a theater was
built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The Quakers of
Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the
acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times
arrested during the performances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding
dramatic performances. At Newport, R.I., on the other hand, which was
a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West
Indies, and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors were
hospitably received. The first play known to have been written by an
American was the _Prince of Parthia_, 1765, a closet drama, by Thomas
Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The first play by an American writer, acted
by professionals in a public theater, was Royall Tyler's _Contrast_,
performed in New York, in 1786. The former of these was very high
tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them is
otherwise remarkable than as