Lippard then commenced employment with the Philadelphia daily newspaper Spirit of the Times. His lively sketches and police court reporting drew readers and increased the paper's circulation. He was but twenty when The Saturday Evening Post published his first story, a "legend" called "Philippe de Agramont."
Lippard wrote what he called "historical fictions and legends", which he defined as "history in its details and delicate tints, with the bloom and dew yet fresh upon it, yet told to us, in the language of passion, of poetry, of home!"[3] These works, then, were not so much about what happened, as what Lippard believed ought to have happened. Some of his legendary romances include: The Ladye Annabel (1842); 'Bel of Prairie Eden (1848); Blanche of Brandywine (1846); The Nazarene (1846); Legends of Mexico (1847); and Legends of the Revolution (1847). One of the particular Legends of the Revolution was called "The Fourth of July, 1776," though it has come down to us under the name "Ring, Grandfather, Ring". The story was first published on January 2, 1847, in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier before being collected in Washington and His Generals. The story introduced "a tall slender man... dressed in a dark robe", left unidentified, whose stirring speech inspired the faint-hearted members of the Second Continental Congress to sign the Declaration of Independence.[4] After the document was signed, Lippard claimed, independence was announced to the people by the ringing of the Liberty Bell on the 4th of July,[5] causing its fabled crack, though this event did not happen. Another of Lippard's legends misrepresents somewhat the beliefs of Johannes Kelpius and his community of followers along the Wissahickon Creek; John Greenleaf Whittier relied on Lippard's legend about Kelpius for his long poem Pennsylvania Pilgrim. Another of Lippard's legends, "The Dark Eagle," about Benedict Arnold, was received uncritically by later readers, though few of its contemporary readers would have done the same. Many of the legends were republished in the Saturday Courier; another edition Legends of the Revolution was published 22 years after his death in 1876.
