“ Although much of his literary work consisted of political journalism, he yet found time to write a large number of essays, poems and tales. From his father, an active revolutionary patriot, Paulding inherited strong anti-British sentiments. He was among the first distinctively American writers, and protested vigorously against intellectual thraldom to the mother-country. As a prose writer he is chaste and elegant, generally just, and realistically descriptive. As a poet he is gracefully commonplace, and the only lines by Paulding which survive in popular memory are the familiar ”

“ John Bull in America; or the New Munchausen (1824) , a broad caricature of the early type of British traveller in America; The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham (1826) ; Chronicles of the City of Gotham, from the Papers of a Retired Common Councilman (1830) ”