political lampoons styled 'The
Anarchiad,' satirized those factions whose disputes imperiled the young
republic, and did much to influence public opinion in Connecticut and
elsewhere in favor of the Federal Constitution. A revision and
enlargement of Dr. Watts's 'Book of Psalmody,' and the publication
(1787) of his own 'Vision of Columbus,' occupied part of Barlow's time
while in Hartford. The latter poem was extravagantly praised, ran
through several editions, and was republished in London and Paris; but
the poet, who now had a wife to support, could not live by his pen nor
by the law, and when in 1788 he was urged by the Scioto Land Company to
become its agent in Paris, he gladly accepted. The company was a private
association, formed to buy large tracts of government land situated in
Ohio and sell them in Europe to capitalists or actual settlers. This
failed disastrously, and Barlow was left stranded in Paris, where he
remained, supporting himself partly by writing, partly by business
ventures. Becoming intimate with the leaders of the Girondist party, the
man who had dedicated his 'Vision of Columbus' to Louis XVI., and had
also dined with the nobility, now began to figure as a zealous
Republican and as a Liberal in religion. From 1790 to 1793 he passed
most of his time in London, where he wrote a number of political
pamphlets for the Society for Constitutional Information, an
organization openly favoring French Republicanism and a revision of the
British Constitution. Here also, in 1791, he finished a work entitled
'Advice to the Privileged Orders,' which probably would have run through
many editions had it not been suppressed by the British government. The
book was an arraignment of tyranny in church and state, and was quickly
followed by 'The Conspiracy of Kings,' an attack in verse on those
European countries which had combined to kill Republicanism in France.
In 1792 Barlow was made a citizen of France as a mark of appreciation of
a 'Letter' addressed to the National Convention, giving that body
advice, and when the convention sent commissioners to organize the
province of Savoy into a department, Barlow was one of the number. As a
candidate for deputy from Savoy, he was defeated; but his visit was not
fruitless, for at Chambery the sight of a dish of maize-meal porridge
reminded him of his early home in Connecticut, and inspired him to write
in that ancient French town a typical Yankee poem, 'Hasty Pudding.' Its