lawless masquerade and midnight show;
From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars,
Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars."

The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull's
_McFingal_, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and incomplete
shape at Hartford in 1782. It went through more than thirty editions
in America, and was several times reprinted in England. _McFingal_ was
a satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyalists, and
modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic poem, _Hudibras_. As
Butler's hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so
the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bonfires of
the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated,
and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The
poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery
and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains one of the best of American
political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many
imitations of _Hudibras_, whose manner it follows so closely that some
of its lines, which have passed into currency as proverbs, are
generally attributed to Butler. For example:

"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."

Or this:

"For any man with half an eye
What stands before him may espy;
But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
To see what is not to be seen."

Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own
countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the
newly adopted flag of the Confederation:

"Inscribed with inconsistent types
Of Liberty and thirteen stripes."

Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made such
noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the
group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith,
Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow
had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale,
where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight.
During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at
its close they found themselves again together for a few years at
Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and
literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of _eclat_ to the little
provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an