but most frequently he discussed the political issues related to American independence. Freneau soon found himself deeply involved in these exercised and in political activity. He declared himself steadfast in favor of Americans rights as free men. Freneau especially adm!
             ired the Reverend John Livington's essays dealing with the "inestimable value of liberty."(Encyclopedia of American Literature)
             Inspired my Livingston's views, Freneau, together with his friends James Madison, Hugh Henry Brackenrigde, and William Bradford formed the "American Whig Society". Its purpose was to rival the Tory Cliosophic Society.
             It was here that Freneau discovered an interest in political writing and a talent for invective and partisan debate. He threw himself into the quarrel with the Cliosophics, writing satires designed to destroy and humiliate the Cliosophics.
             All of his efforts culminated in a jumbled satiric novel Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca (Encyclopedia of American Literature), he wrote that with Brackenridge. Satirizing the Tories at the college and calling them ludicrous, the intellectual pretension, inhumanity, and social instability of American society, the work was coarse, crude and unfocused as it did capture the antiauthoritarianism, quarrelsomeness, and insecurity of the age.
             Under Witherspoon's influence at Princeton, Freneau also took up the study of belles lettres. (Encyclopedia of American Literature) He learned that the cultivation of taste was important to the moral and social improvement of individuals and societies. Literature made an immediate impression on his mind and so raised the moral and intellectual sensibility of the audience. Some of the authors he read were "Xenephon, Homer, Cicero, Vergil, and Horace", many of whose poems he later translated. He also read the English writers, concentrating on "William Shakespeare, John Miltion, John Dryden, Sam...