After FRENEAU left Philadelphia BAILEY issued the first collection of his poems, in a volume of more than four hundred pages, entitled "The Poems of PHILIP FRENEAU, written chiefly during the late War." In his advertisement, dated the sixth of June, 1786, the publisher says:

"The pieces now collected and printed in the following sheets were left in my hands by the author, above a year ago, with permission to publish them whenever I thought proper. A considerable number of the performances contained in this volume, as many will recollect, have appear ed at different times in newspapers, (particularly the Freeman's Journal) and other periodical publications in the dif ferent states of America, during the late war, and since; and from the avidity and pleasure with which they generally appear to have been read by persons of the best taste, the printer now the more readily gives them to the world in their present form, (without troubling the reader with any affected apologies for their supposed or real imperfec tions,) in hopes they will afford a high degree of satisfaction to the lovers of poetical wit, and elegance of expression."

pursue. At a cabinet council, he says, WASHINGTON remarked that "That rascal, FRENEAU, sent him three copies of his papers every day, as if he thought he (WASHINGTON) would become the distributor of them; that he could see in this nothing but an impudent design to insult him: he ended in a high tone." Again, speaking of the President, Mr. JEFFERSON says, "He adverted to a piece in FRENEAU's paper of yesterday; he said he despised all their attacks on him personally, but that there had never been an act of the government, not meaning in the executive line only, but in any line, which that paper had not abused. He was evidently sore and warm, and I took his intention to be, that I should interpose in some way with FRENEAU, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk in my office. But I will not do it. His paper has saved our Constitution, which was galloping fast into morarchy, and has been checked by no one means In the following October notice was given in so powerfully as by that paper. It is well and unithe Freeman's Journal, that " An Additional Col-versally known that it has been that paper which lection of Entertaining Original Performances, in Prose and Verse, by PHILIP FRENEAU," would be issued as soon as a sufficient number of copies should be subscribed for; but such a time did not arrive, and it was not until the twenty-seventh of April, 1788, that Mr. BAILEY gave the public The Miscellaneous Works of PHILIP FRENEAU, containing his Essays and Additional Poems." Nearly half the copies of this volume were subscribed for in Charleston.

On the twenty-fourth of April, 1789, General WASHINGTON arrived in New York from Mount Vernon, to enter upon his duties as President of the United States. As the procession of boats by which he was attended from Elizabethtown Point approached the city, it is mentioned in the journals of the day, that the schooner Columbia, Captain PHILIP FRENEAU, eight days from Charleston, came up the bay. This was the poet's last voyage for several years. He now engaged with the printers, CHILDS and SWAINE, to edit the New York "Daily Advertiser," and continued in this employment until the removal of the government to Philadelphia, when he became a translating clerk in the Department of State, under Mr. JEFFERSON, and editor of the "National Gazette," which gained an infamous reputation by its attacks on WASHINGTON's administration. FRENEAU made oath to a statement that Mr. JEFFERSON did not compose or suggest any of the contents of his paper, but in his old age he acknowledged to Dr. JOHN W. FRANCIS that the Secretary wrote or dictated the most offensive articles against WASIIINGTON and his friends, and to Dr. JAMES MEASE he exhibited a file of the "Gazette," in which what were alleged to be his contributions were marked. This matter has been much and angrily debated, but it has not been denied that the conduct of the clerk was in the main, at least, approved by his employer. The President could not forbear speaking to Mr. JEFFERSON of FRENEAU's abuse, and requesting him, as a member of his cabinet, to administer him some rebuke. Mr. JEFFERSON tells us in his "Anas" what course he chose to

has checked the career of the monocrats," &c.

During the prevalence of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, in 1793, the publication of the "National Gazette" was suspended; and Mr. JEFFERSON having retired from the cabinet, it was not resumed. FRENEAU was for a few months without any regular occupation. I have seen two let ters, one written by JEFFERSON and the other by MADISON, in which he is commended to certain citizens of New York, for his "extensive information, sound discretion," and other qualities, as a candidate for the editorship of a journal which it was intended to establish in that city. The project was abandoned, or his application unsuccessful, and on the second of May, 1795, he commenced The Jersey Chronicle," at Mount Pleasant, near Middletown Point, in New Jersey, which was continued every week for one year, the fiftysecond number having appeared on the thirtieth of April, 1796. In the " Chronicle" he maintained his opposition to the administration of WASHINGTON, and the unpopularity of its politics with the reading classes doubtless prevented its success. He now again turned his attention to New York, and on the thirteenth of March, 1797, issued there the first number of "The TimePiece and Literary Companion," which was published tri-weekly, and devoted more largely than any other paper in the country to belles-lettres, while it embraced news and frequent discussions of public affairs. FRENEAU himself contributed to almost every number one or more copies of verses, and he had many poetical correspondents. After six months, MATTHEW L. DAVIS, then a very young man, became his partner, and at the end of the first year "The Time-Piece" was resigned entirely to his direction.*

"The Time-Piece" was afterwards edited by JOHN D'OLEY BURKE, an Irishman, who, in 1798, was arrested under the Alien and Sedition law. Burke was a noisy Democrat, and possessed of but moderate abilities. He wrote "Bunker Hill, or the Death of Warren," a play; "The Columbiad, an Epic Poem;""The History of Virginia," &c., and was killed in a duel, in 1808.

In 1798 FRENEAU went again to South Carolina, and, becoming master of a merchant ship, he made several voyages, of which we have some souvenirs in his subsequently published poems. In 1799 and in 1801 he visited St. Thomas; in 1803 he was in the island of Madeira; in 1804 he declines in a copy of verses an invitation to visit a nunnery in Teneriffe, and in 1806 he leaves New York, in command of the sloop Industry, for Savannah, Charleston, and the West Indies. From some lines "To Hezekiah Salem," a name by which he frequently describes himself, it may be inferred that he also made a voyage to Calcutta.

While conducting the "Jersey Chronicle," at Monmouth, in 1795, he had published a second edition of his collection of poems, in a closelyprinted octavo volume; and in 1809, after his final abandonment of the life of a sailor, he issued a third edition, in Philadelphia, in two duodecimo volumes, entiled "Poems written and published during the American Revolutionary War, and now republished from the original Manuscripts, interspersed with Translations from the Ancients, and other Pieces not heretofore in Print." In the last-mentioned year he addressed a short poem to his friend Mr. JEFFERSON, on his retirement from the Presidency of the United States, and celebrated in another the death of THOMAS PAINE, of whom he was an ardent admirer.

When the second war with Great Britain came on, he restrung his lyre, and commemorated in characteristic verses the triumphs of our arms, especially our naval victories; and his songs and ballads relating to these events are still reprinted in "broadsides," and sold in every port. They were for the most part included in two small volumes which he published in New York, after the peace, under the title of " A Collection of Poems on American Affairs, and a Variety of other Subjects, chiefly Moral and Political, written between 1797 and 1815." He afterwards contemplated a complete edition of his works, and in a letter to Dr. MEASE inquires whether there is "still enough of the old spirit of patriotism abroad to insure the safety of such an adventure." His house at Mount Pleasant was destroyed by fire in 1815 or 1816, and he laments to the same correspondent the loss, by that misfortune, of some of his best compositions, which had never been given to the public.

In his old age FRENEAU resided in New Jersey, but made occasional visits to Philadelphia, where he was always welcomed by Mrs. LYDIA R. BAILEY, who was the daughter-in-law of his early friend and publisher, FRANCIS BAILEY, and had herself been his publisher in 1809. More frequently he passed a few days in New York, where he found living many of the companions of his active and ambitious life. Here too he became intimate with Dr. JOHN W. FRANCIS, to whom he was wont to recount the incidents of his varied history, and to discourse of his ancient associations, with a careless enthusiasm, such as only the genial inquisition of a FRANCIS could awaken. Mrs. BAILEY, who still carries on the printing

house which her father-in-law established threequarters of a century ago, has described to me the poet as he appeared to her in his prime. "He was a small man," she says, "very gentleman. like in his manners, very entertaining in his conversation, and withal a great favourite with the ladies;" the venerable ex-manager of the Philadelphia theatre, Mr. WILLIAM B. WOOD, now (in 1855) seventy-seven years old, also remembers him, and concurs in this description. Dr. FRANCIS'S recollections of the bard are of a later date; he describes him as having dressed, in his later years, like a farmer, and as having had "a fine expression of countenance for so old a man-mild, pensive, and intelligent."

FRENEAU perished in a snow-storm, in his eightieth year, during the night of the eighteenth of December, 1832, near Freehold. On the ap proach of evening he had left an inn of that village for his home, a mile and a half distant. He was unattended, and it is supposed he lost his way. The next morning, says Mr. WILLIAM LLOYD of Freehold, in a letter to Dr. MEASE, from which I derive these particulars, his body was found, par tially covered by the snow, in a meadow, a little aside from his direct path.

FRENEAU was unquestionably a man of consid erable genius, and among his poems are illustra tions of creative passion which will preserve his name long after authors of more refinement and elegance are forgotten. His best pieces were for the most part written in early life, when he was most ambitious of literary distinction. Of these, "The Dying Indian," "The Indian Student," and others copied into the following pages, are finely conceived and very carefully finished. It is worthy of notice that he was the first of our authors to treat the "ancients of these lands" with a just appreciation, and in a truly artistical spirit. His song of "Alknomock" had long the popularity of a national air. Mr. WASHINGTON IRVING informs me that when he was a youth it was familiar in every drawing-room, and among the earliest theatrical reminiscences of Mr. WILLIAM B. WOOD is its production, in character, upon the stage. The once well-known satire, entitled "A New England Sabbath-day Chase," was so much in vogue when Mr. IRVING was a school-boy, that he committed it to memory as an exercise in declamation. The political odes and pasquinades which he wrote during the revolution possess much historical interest, and, with his other works, they will some time undoubtedly be collected and edited with the care due to unique and curious souvenirs of so remarkable an age. In an address "To the Americans of the United States," first published in November, 1797, FRENEAU himself evinces a sense of the proper distinc tion of his writings: Catching our subjects," he says,

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-"from the varying scene,
Of human things, a mingled work we draw,
Chequered with fancies odd and figures strange,
Such as no courtly poet ever saw
Who writ, beneath some great man's ceiling placed,—
Traveled no lands, nor roved the watery waste."