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

There is also a line of Sir Walter Scott which has its origin in Freneau. In the introduction to the third canto of Marmion in the apostrophe to the Duke of Brunswick, we read:--

Lamented chief — not thine the power
To save in that presumptuous hour,
When Prussia hurried to the field,
And snatch'd the spear but left the shield.

In Freneau's poem on the heroes of Eutaw, we have this stanza:--

They saw their injur'd country's woe;
The flaming town, the wasted field,
Then rush'd to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear — but left the shield.

An anecdote which the late Henry Brevoort was accustomed to relate of his visit to Scott, affords assurance that the poet was really indebted to Freneau, and that he would not, on a proper occasion, have hesitated to acknowledge the obligation. Mr. Brevoort was asked by Scott respecting the authorship of certain verses on the battle of Eutaw, which he had seen in a magazine, and had by heart, and which he knew were American. He was told that they were by Freneau, when he (Scott) remarked, ‘The poem is as fine a ’