s was by far the
most sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been published in
America, and was embellished with plates executed by the best London
engravers.

The _Columbiad_ was a grandiose performance, and has been the theme of
much ridicule by later writers. Hawthorne suggested its being
dramatized, and put on to the accompaniment of artillery and thunder
and lightning; and E. P. Whipple declared that "no critic in the last
fifty years had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its
ambitiousness and its length it was symptomatic of the spirit of the
age which was patriotically determined to create, by _tour de force_, a
national literature of a size commensurate with the scale of American
nature and the destinies of the republic. As America was bigger than
Argos and Troy we ought to have a bigger epic than the _Iliad_.
Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a
"hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the
history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it,
Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and
fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the
English colonies in North America; the old French and Indian wars; the
Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the
new-born nation. The machinery of the _Vision_ was borrowed from the
11th and 12th books of _Paradise Lost_. Barlow's verse was the
ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his poetic style was
distinguished by the vague, glittering imagery and the false sublimity
which marked the epic attempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though Barlow
was but a masquerader in true heroic he showed himself a true poet in
mock heroic. His _Hasty Pudding_, written in Savoy in 1793, and
dedicated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly American, in subject at
least, and its humor, though over-elaborate, is good. One couplet in
particular has prevailed against oblivion:

"E'en in thy native regions how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee _Mush_!"

Another Connecticut poet--one of the seven who were fondly named "The
Pleiads of Connecticut"--was Timothy Dwight, whose _Conquest of
Canaan_, written shortly after his graduation from college, but not
published till 1785, was, like the _Columbiad_, an experiment toward
the domestication of the epic muse in America. It was written like
Barlow's poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriot