graduate of Harvard College, a physician, and an eminent schoolmaster, is described on his tombstone as "the renouned poet of New England." New-England's Crisis is his chief work. After a prologue in praise of simplicity

an ingenious adaptation to New-England of a famous passage in Boethius- Tompson describes King Philip as holding an assembly of his "peers" and his "commons. and delivering an oration against the colonists. This speech is partly in good English, but it is variegated with imitations of the Indian pronunciation and syntax. There are even two native Indian words, wunnegin, which 'bad," 2 good," and matchit, which means both of which were of course perfectly familiar to the whites. Tompson passes for the earliest native American poet. At all events, he must be credited with the first piece of "dialect verse dialect verse" ever written in this country. the extract which follows, the punctuation has been regulated, but no other changes have been made:

means

And here methinks I see this greazy Lout,
With all his pagan slaves coil'd round about,
Assuming all the majesty his throne

Of rotten stump, or of the rugged stone,

Could yield; casting some bacon-rine-like looks,
Enough to fright a Student from his books,

Thus treat his peers, & next to them his Commons,
Kennel'd together all without a summons:
"My friends, our Fathers were not half so wise
As we our selves, who see with younger eyes;
They sel our land to english man, who teach
Our nation all so fast to pray and preach.
Of all our countrey they enjoy the best,
And quickly they intend to have the rest.
This no wunnegin; so big matchit law,
Which our old fathers fathers never saw
These english make, and we must keep them too,
Which is too hard for us or them to doe.

1 See Trumbull, Natick Dictionary, 1903, p. 202.
2 See Trumbull, p. 50 (s. v. matche).

"2

In

We drink, we so big whipt; but english they
Go sneep, no more, or else a little pay.

Me meddle Squaw, me hang'd; our fathers kept
What Squaws they would, whither they wakt or slept.
Now, if you'le fight, Ile get you english coats,
And wine to drink out of their Captains throats.
The richest merchants houses shall be ours;
Wee'l ly no more on matts or dwell in bowers.
Wee'l have their silken wives; take they our Squaws!
They shall be whipt by virtue of our laws.

If ere we strike, tis now, before they swell
To greater swarmes then we know how to quell.
This my resolve, let neighbouring Sachems know,
And every one that hath club, gun, or bow."
This was assented to, and, for a close,

He stroke his smutty beard and curst his foes.1

Philip's comparison between penalties for Indians and penalties for English is very pithily expressed, and it is precisely here that the Indianisms are most marked:

We drink, we so big whipt; but English they
Go sneep, no more, or else a little pay.

That is, "If we Indians get drunk, we are severely whipped. But if the English get drunk, they merely go and sleep it off, or perhaps have to pay a slight fine." Tompson was a scholar, a student of the tongues. Possibly he was here reproducing an actual bit of "Indian talk." At all events, he must be pretty close to the linguistic facts. The use of sneep for sleep corresponds with what has often been observed, the Indian substitution of n for in English words. Massasoit always called his friend Winslow "Winsnow."

It

Tompson's sketch of King Philip is not flattering. reminds one of the alleged portrait of the Indian potentate engraved by Paul Revere in 1772.2 This is so ugly as to

1 Tompson, New-England's Crisis, Club of Odd Volumes, 1894, pp. 10–11. 2 For the second edition of Church's History of King Philip's War (Boston, 1772); reproduced by S. G. Drake, Book of the Indians, 8th ed., Boston, 1841.