Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
Two years before, and before he began his gazette, William Parks
printed in broadside a more sympathetic and conventional poem, An
Blogy on the Death of Thomas Bordley, Bsq,. late Commissary and At­
torney-General, in the Province of Maryland . . . by Ebenezer Cook,
Poet-Laureat, of Maryland. The forty-nine-line lament of twenty-three
decasyllabic couplets and one triplet has the distinction of being the first
belletristic work known to have been published in Maryland.111 This pas­
toral is seriously laudatory and consoling to Bordley's wife, concluding
with a semi-detached epitaph referring to Bordley's legal profession.
Cook may have published another elegy, "On the Death of the Honour­
able William Lock, Esq., one of his Lordship's Provincial Justices," in a
now lost issue of the Maryland Gazette, but the poem survives only in a
manuscript letter in the Library of Congress. Thirty-two lines of decasyl­
labic couplets continue in the classical-pastoral tradition without a trace
of Christian eschatology or mortuary detail, and with many legal phrases
in both elegy and concluding "Epitaph." 112 One other poem, "In Memory
of the Honourable Benedict Calvert," presumably by Cook, exists in a
manuscript folio notebook in the United States Naval Academy Library.
It is sympathetic but includes some rather gruesome mortuary detail of
Calvert's body being devoured by fish (he died at sea) . Entirely classical
in allusion, it eulogizes the public character of a popular and able provincial
official. 113
In the same notebook is a longer elegy "To the Memory of His Excelly
Benedict Leonard Calvert; Late Governour of the Province of Maryland"
signed by Richard Lewis, the only signed poem in the book. It is intro­
duced by a long Latin quotation from Pliny the Younger's letter to
Pompei us Saturn us concerning a friend who died aboard ship. Writing
in the form of an epistle, Lewis traces Calvert's early years, including his
stay at Oxford, his sacred and profane reading and general learning, his
visits to the Mediterranean countries as an able antiquarian, his pleasure
in describing to the poet the glories of Greece and Rome, his graciousness
as a host, his benefactions to Maryland education. Not one word of
Christian faith appears, but even Calvert's social manner is described:
When Gaily dress'd, to Grace the Publick Ball,
He to soft Music mov'd around the Hall;
His artfull Step, his Unaffected Air,
His Easy Grandeur, Charm'd the Circling Fair;
Each Dancer his Superior Skill Confess'd,
And Pleasure Glow'd in each Spectator's Breast.114
It is a far cry from these lines to any to be found in the New England
elegies.