Upon a more elaborate hoax Bryant and Sands were assisted by Professors Anderson and Da Ponte--“a very learned jeu d’esprit,” he called it. It was a long letter to the _Evening Post_ signed John Smith, in which they took a familiar couplet and translated it through all the principal tongues, ancient and modern, even into several Indian languages. It is hard to believe that these erudite quips had a large audience; but Bryant’s ode to Fanny Wright was much admired, and was generally attributed to Halleck, until that gentleman disclaimed it. In these high-spirited productions we see a side of Bryant that largely disappeared under his growing cares and the dignity that increased with his celebrity. We see the Bryant who used to meet with Verplanck and Sands at the house of the latter’s father in the hamlet of Hoboken, and make it ring with declamation and uproarious laughter. We see the poet-editor who used to throw off all anxieties and go for long walks, studying nature or chatting with companions, and who once at an evening party apologized for his fatigue by explaining that he had covered the road from Haverstraw to New York, nearly forty miles, that day. Bryant had his fun-loving side, and the few men whom he found closely congenial had no reason to complain of his coldness, as others often did.
But the new editor’s most effective impress upon the _Evening Post_ was in its political and economic utterances. The journal had already inclined toward a low-tariff policy, for the commercial community of New York opposed protection; but its editorials upon this subject, as upon many others, were feeble. Bryant in the years 1822–24 had been led by his friends the Sedgwicks to study the British economists, Adam Smith, Thornton, and Ricardo, and the debates upon tariff questions prominent in Parliament about 1820. Theodore Sedgwick was a pronounced advocate of free trade, and completely converted Bryant. From the young man’s convictions upon this subject flowed his attachment to Jackson as an opponent of protection and monopoly, and his intense dislike of Clay, the leading advocate of the so-called American tariff system. He had once been a Federalist, and as a boy had written a hot Federalist poem, “The Embargo,” but his free-trade views now fast made him an ardent Democrat. His sympathies in commercial legislation were not with his native New England, but with the South.