George Richards was born in Rhode Island in the late 1750s or early 1760s. There he was introduced to verse-making, and he recalled in later years the "imbecile lays" he had then produced. After the Revolution, he settled in Boston as a schoolmaster and, after 1785, an occasional preacher in Boston's recently organized Universalist church. By the end of 1783, he was a contributor of verse to local periodicals, but his larger literary debut came with the publication in April 1789 of The Political Passing Bell: An Elegy. Written in a Country Meeting House. A quirky adaptation of the meter and manner of Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, the parody addresses political disruptions in Boston at election time. Two months later, extracts from his long poem "The Zenith of Glory" began to appear in Isaiah Thomas's Massachusetts Magazine, and it continued to be published irregularly in eighteen installments through...