ABSTRACT
James McHenry, poet, novelist, literary critic, was born in Larne, County Antrim, Ireland and emigrated to the United States with his wife and infant son in 1816, settling in Philadelphia in 1823; he returned to Ireland in 1843. McHenry was a conservative critic and a poet in the eighteenth-century classical mould. His final poem, Antediluvians; or, The World Destroyed, a ten-book epic in blank verse chronicling the Biblical Flood, had a disastrous reception. The Spectre of the Forest is a romance focusing on witchcraft in the seventeenth century. Public approbation is the most effectual, at the same time that it is the most pleasing, of all excitements to literary exertion. Under its influence, apathy becomes ardent, indolence active, and timidity bold; and the author who can witness the surest of all evidences of public favour, the smiles of his publisher, without feeling inclined to continue the efforts by which he acquired them.
