SOURCE: "The Connecticut Wits," The Yale Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, January, 1913, pp. 242-56.

[Beers is an American historian, researcher, and critic. Here, he offers a mixed assessment of the works of the Connecticut

Title page of The Anarchiad, 1861.

In the days when Connecticut counted in the national councils; when it had men in the patriot armies, in Washington's Cabinet, in the Senate of the United States—men like Israel Putnam, Roger Sherman, Oliver Wolcott, Oliver Ellsworth,—in those same days there was a premature but interesting literary movement in our little commonwealth. A band of young graduates of Yale, some of them tutors in the college, or in residence for their Master's degree, formed themselves into a school for the cultivation of...