Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[54] quoted in Mr. Griswold's “Republican Court,” declares that some resident families could not have supported the cost of their entertainments and their losses at 100, but that they had the adroitness to make the temporary residents pay their expenses. At balls people danced country dances, the partners being designated beforehand by the host, and usually remaining unchanged during the whole evening — though “this severity was sometimes mitigated,” in the language of the Marquis de Chastellux, when supper was served, which was usually at midnight.

This picture of Philadelphia life sets before us the conditions under which a litera-The Fist ture was produced which obtained Literary immediate recognition, and in some Centre. instances permanent reputation, here and abroad. From Philadelphia had come, at the end of the colonial period, the remarkably effective work of the conservative John Dickinson, and, somewhat later, the trenchant arguments of the radical Thomas Paine, and the brilliant sallies of the Whig humorist, Francis Hopkinson. The Letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania were written by Dickinson in 1767-1768,