Philip Freneau, the popular poet of the Revolution, issued from his press at Mount Pleasant, Monmouth county, in 1795, a volume of his poems entitled:

Printed at the Press of the Author, at MOUNT PLEASANT, near MIDDLETOWN POINT: M,DCC,XCV: and of American Independence XIX.

Over the Latin motto is a pyramid of fifteen stars-- the pyramid of fifteen American States. There are other editions of his poems, but this one is so rare that it is highly prized by antiquarians. Our attention has been called to this book by the fact that in a recent London bookseller's catalogue a copy is advertised for sale; price, £3.10s. (about seventeen dollars.) A leading American dealer in, and importer of rare and curious works, generally charges a customer here forty cents for every shilling a book costs in London, to cover risks and profit. This would make this book cost an American purchaser twenty-eight dollars! But this is not the highest price this work has been held at. A friend found a copy in an antiquarian bookstore in Washington a few years ago, for which the dealer asked some forty odd dollars, but finally got down to thirty-five dollars!

Philip Freneau married Miss Eleanor Forman, daughter of Samuel Forman, a wealthy citizen of the county. Colonel Jonathan and Denise Forman, mentioned in the historical sketches of the county in connection with Revolutionary matters, were her brothers, and General David Forman was a cousin. Both Mr. and Mrs. Freneau are buried at Mount Pleasant. He died December 18, 1832.

The following account of his death was published in the Monmouth Inquirer at the time:

"Mr Freneau was in the village, and started towards evening to go home, about two miles. In attempting to go across he appears to have got lost and mired in a bog meadow, where his lifeless corps was discovered yesterday. Captain Freneau was a stanch Whig in the time of the Revolution, a good soldier and a warm patriot. The productions of his pen animated his countrymen in the darkest days of '76, and the effusions of his muse cheered the desponding soldier as he fought the battles of freedom."

"Of this poet, from whom Thomas Campbell and Walter Scott did not hesitate to plagiarize; whom the greatest English critic compared to Gray and who wrote pieces that Scott learned by heart, one of which he pronounced 'as fine as anything written in the English language,' is a man of whom Monmouth has a reason to be proud. He was the intimate friend of leading American statesmen for nearly two generations."