In 1797, John Swanwick, a prosperous Philadelphia merchant, Republican member of Congress, and anti-Cobbett pamphleteer, published his one book of poems. It contains a memorial poem dedicated to David Rittenhouse, internationally renowned astronomer and mechanist from Philadelphia who, next to Benjamin Franklin, had been revered in life as greatest American scientist of century, and who had died previous June. poem opens: Fame, seize thy clarion--found along shore, America's great artist is no more-- He whose sagacious enterprize could scan, Of worlds, motion and plan; In mechanism whole could trace, And tear veil from nature's mystic face: He now is gone--(173) Casting an heroic image of Rittenhouse's astronomical method as one that could trace, from the motion and plan of starry worlds clockwork of human mechanism, opening lines of Swanwick's eulogium turn on a rhetorical equation between physical revolutions of celestial bodies and smaller orbital sphere of endeavor. Such equations were becoming common in rhetoric of early national period in United States. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Robert Treat Paine, Jr., poet, editor, and eponymous son of famed Revolutionary patriot, while at Harvard in 1792 wrote a poem titled, The Nature and Progress of Liberty, which includes: Essential laws, which guide in wide career rapid motions of boundless sphere. There Order bids circling planets run Through heavens vast suburbs round blazing sun; Directs an atom, as it rules pole, Reigns through all worlds, and shines system's soul; This moves vast machine, unknown to jar, And links an insect with farthest star. Thus Freedom here civil system binds, Cements our friendships, and illumes our minds. (70) Indeed, so fond was Paine of this celestial trope that, in 1794, he founded a newspaper in Boston devoted to political and literary topics, named Federal Orrery in honor of same David Rittenhouse that John Swanwick would memorialize in verse three years later. This political troping of celestial motion reflected wider transatlantic efforts to recalibrate existing rhetorical and figurative categories in response to political turbulence of 1770s, '80s, and '90s. Yoking volatile phenomenon of democratic revolution to more stable epistemological coordinates of Newtonian physics and Lockean empiricism, such efforts managed anxieties about unpredictable effects of revolution by theorizing their cause according to mechanical laws. I open with these samples of 1790s American verse for another reason, though, in hope that it may provide a turnkey, of sorts, I might use to steal my way into a set of questions with which these poems may not at first appear to be related. First, to what degree does this transatlantic phenomenon of rhetorical management in verse correspond to contemporary theoretical debates about novelistic forms of literary representation? Second, how might such rhetorical equations reflect generalized cultural anxieties about status of romance writing as compared to other representational and epistemological categories? Third, specifically, what is at stake for American novelist Charles Brockden Brown in distinction between categories of history and romance, and what might that distinction say about contested historiographical legacies of democratic revolution? In Monthly Magazine and American Review, a magazine Charles Brockden Brown largely wrote himself, he had rehearsed question in a number of articles--Parallel Between Hume, Robertson in May of 1799; Walstein's School of History, from later that year; and, in short essay that will occupy my attention here, The Difference Between History and Romance, from August issue of 1800. …