kept its place in school-readers and other collections. His son,
Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of _Hail Columbia_, which is saved
from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, the then
popular air of "The President's March." The words were written in
1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a time when
party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by crowds in the streets,
and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater; for by this
time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and even in
puritanic Boston. Much better than _Hail Columbia_ was the
_Star-Spangled Banner_, the words of which were composed by Francis
Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort
McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the
once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., _Adams and Liberty_,
recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society.
The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it
is, notwithstanding, a very wooden performance. Paine was a young
Harvard graduate, who had married an actress playing at the Old Federal
Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Boston, in 1794. His
name was originally Thomas, but this was changed for him by the
Massachusetts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded
with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile
in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for
liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or remembered only
by some phrase which has become a current quotation. Here and there a
line has, by accident, survived to do duty as a motto or inscription,
while all its context is buried in oblivion. Few have read any thing
more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than the couplet,

"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours,"