[Illustration:  Joel Barlow]

The brilliant career predicted for Barlow did not begin immediately.  Distaste for war, hope of securing a tutorship in college, and—­we may well believe—­Miss Ruth’s entreaties, kept him in New Haven two years longer, engaged in teaching and in various courses of study.  ’The Prospect of Peace’ had been issued in pamphlet form, and the compliments paid the author incited him to plan a poem of a philosophic character on the subject of America at large, bearing the title ’The Vision of Columbus.’  The appointment as tutor never came, and instead of cultivating the Muse in peaceful New Haven, he was forced to evoke her aid in a tent on the banks of the Hudson, whither after a hurried course in theology, he proceeded as an army chaplain in 1780.  During his connection with the army, which lasted until its disbandment in 1783, he won repute by lyrics written to encourage the soldiers, and by “a flaming political sermon,” as he termed it, on the treason of Arnold.

Army life ended, Barlow removed to Hartford, where he studied law, edited the American Mercury,—­a weekly paper he had helped to found,—–­ and with John Trumbull, Lemuel Hopkins, and David Humphreys formed a literary club which became widely known as the “Hartford Wits.”  Its chief publication, a series of 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