Richard Alsop, poet, satirist, gentleman-financier, was one among a group of writers commonly called the Connecticut or Hartford Wits, a group which also included Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, John Trumbull, Mason Fitch Cogswell, Theodore Dwight, Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, and Elihu Hubbard Smith. Prominent during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Connecticut Wits were able, prolific writers who generally sought to glorify America, to defend federal principles of government, and to educate their readers, especially in matters of taste and morality. Although they only occasionally approached the skill of their English models in poetry (such as Pope, Swift, Gray, Churchill, Akenside) and prose (such as Addison and Steele), the group as a whole captured the interests and voiced the ideals and ambitions of their contemporaries. Considered by some readers the most gifted of the wits, Alsop probably had no part in the group's mock-heroic collaboration...