Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[41] the current method of university education. The book is forgotten, but some of its epigrammatic couplets still linger, like:--

For metaphysics, rightly shown,
But teach how little can be known.

Or:--

First from the dust our sex began,
But woman was refined from man.

This is the measure of Butler's Hudibras, which Trumbull was to employ again in his masterpiece, McFingal. The first canto of McFingal was published in April, 1775, soon after Lexington and Concord. The hero is a Scottish-American Tory, and the scene is laid at a New England town meeting; an admirable setting for the most famous of the Revolutionary satires. It has not become quite a classic; for, with all his wit and taste, Trumbull lacked the fire of imagination, and the exquisite sense of fitness in expression which belong to creative genius.

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Printed oratory.

Critics who wish to confine themselves to considering the expression of life in literature, must often be embarrassed by the fact, that, in very important historical periods, life often finds an intense and