“From Susquehanna’s farthest springs,
    Where savage tribes pursue their game
  (His blanket tied with yellow strings),
    A shepherd of the forest came.”

Campbell “lifted”—­in his poem O’Conor’s Child—­the last line of the following stanza from Freneau’s Indian Burying Ground: 

  “By midnight moons, o’er moistening dews,
    In vestments for the chase arrayed,
  The hunter still the deer pursues—­
    The hunter and the deer, a shade.”

And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in Marmion, the final line of one of the stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw Springs: 

  “They saw their injured country’s woe,
    The flaming town, the wasted field;
  Then rushed to meet the insulting foe,
    They took the spear, but left the shield.”

Scott inquired of an American gentleman who visited him the authorship of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing of the kind as there was in the language.

The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginning during the period now under review.  A company of English players came to this country in 1762 and made the tour of many of the principal towns.  The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage was the Merchant of Venice, which was given by the English company at Williamsburg, Va., in 1752.  The first regular theater building was at Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe performed, among other pieces, Farquhar’s Beaux’ Stratagem.  In 1753 a theater was built in New York, and one in 1759 in Philadelphia.  The Quakers of Philadelphia and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the acting of plays, and in the latter city the players were several times arrested during the performances, under a Massachusetts law forbidding dramatic performances.  At Newport, R.I., on the other hand, which was a health resort for planters from the Southern States and the West Indies, and the largest slave-market in the North, the actors were hospitably received.  The first play known to have been written by an American was the Prince of Parthia, 1765, a closet drama, by Thomas Godfrey, of Philadelphia.  The first play by an American writer, acted by professionals in a public theater, was Royall Tyler’s Contrast, performed in New York, in 1786.  The former of these was very high tragedy, and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them is otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of indifferent dramas.  There is, in fact, no American dramatic literature worth speaking of; not a single American play of even the second rank, unless we except a few graceful parlor comedies, like Mr. Howell’s Elevator and Sleeping-Car.  Royall Tyler, the author of The Contrast, cut quite a figure in his day as a wit and journalist, and eventually became chief-justice of Vermont.  His comedy, The Georgia Spec, 1797, had a great run in Boston, and his Algerine Captive, published in the same year, was one of the earliest American novels.  It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed somewhat upon the plan of Smollett’s novels and dealing with the piracies which led to the war between the United States and Algiers in 1815.