Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH ' But back to the Maryland Gazette, which on October 20 published "An Elegy on the Death of Miss Elizabeth Young, late of Calvert County, Gentlewoman, by a Welwisher." The forty-eight heroic-couplet lines list the qualities the writer sees in the young girl, qualities perhaps more ideal than actual. This, and the elegy on Miss Peggy Hill, are strikingly like Benjamin Tompson's "The Amiable virgin memorized-Elizabeth Tompson ... " (1702 ) in insistence on Christian piety and virtue. One principal difference, however, is that the southern poem begins in the pastoral-classical tradition: MELPOMENE , assist my mournful Theme Direct my Numbers and inspire my Flame, With mournful Cypress let my Muse be crown'd. But later lines share similar words and sentiment with the Puritan poem: "Here's One who's fall'n by thy pow'rful Hand / Who fram'd her Life t 'obey God's great Command." 115 The anonymous Maryland poem on Peggy Hill is equally personal and lacks any pastoral allusions. On the other hand, only one reference to God and nothing of Christian doctrine appear in the forty-seven decasyllabic lines. Thomas Cradock's best-known elegy uA POEM Sacred to the Memory of Miss Margaret Lawson, Miss Dorothy Lawson, and Miss Elizabeth Read," which appeared in the Gazette of March 22, 1753, is more interesting, for it has classical dream-vision structure mingled with some orthodox Protestant religious concepts. One does not learn from the lines what occasioned the deaths of so many youthful ones (perhaps smallpox? ), but there are suggestions, in the inserted speeches, of Christian immortality, with the conclusion that the subjects' parents shall see them again in "Heaven's due time ... (on} yon immortal Shores." Richard Lewis published in the Gazette of March 15, 1734, a long and ambitious "Elegy on the much lamented Death of the Honourable Charles Calvert, Esq; formerly Governor in Chief of the Province of Maryland; and at the Time of his Dicease, Commissary-General, Judge of the Admiralty, Surveyor-General of the Western Shore, and President of the Council. Who departed this life, February 2, 1733-4." The 221 lines are in a heightened or formal diction somewhat in contrast to that of the verses in memory of Benedict Leonard Calvert. The symbolic yew tree, premature death, Calvert's military prowess, his restoration of Maryland to prosperity, the lament of the "Genius of Maryland" and the reminder that the province contains "within {her} pregnant Womb / Heroes unborn, and Empires yet to come," are conventional and yet peculiarly colonial. The language and rhythms flow with dignity and solemn effect, the meter with more spondees than are usual in Lewis' 1406
· Literature, Principally Belletristic . verse, creating a slow movement and genuinely elegiac tone. Among the southern laments of the eighteenth century, this is one which compares favorably with Urian Oakes' or the best other Puritan elegies,116 or for that matter with any other elegies of colonial America. At least two elegiac pieces written in Maryland and published without signature may be attributed to James Sterling on the basis of the "Kent in Maryland" dateline and the style as well as the annotated ascription in the Library of Congress copy of the journal containing the first. This earlier, "Epitaph on the Late Lord Howe," appeared in the Philadelphia American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for August 1758 (pp. 550-552) and was reprinted in the Maryland Gazette and the New York Gazette. The twenty-two lines have the majestic tread of a funeral march : "Patriots and chiefs! Britannia's mighty Dead, / Whose wisdom counsel'd, and whose valour bled." 111 Equally patriotic and dignified is Sterling'S "Panegyrical Verses on the Death of General Wolfe," published in the Pennsylvania Gazette of March 13, 1760 by the "author of the Epitaph on Lord Howe." It was reprinted in the New York Gazette and the Boston Gazette in the same year. Sterling has Amherst address the conquering British army in an imaginative recreation of the latter's speech on learning of Wolfe's death. This is a public occasional poem more of triumph than of grief, celebrating the fact that a new world on which the sun never set was "to GEORGE's Empire won:' 118 Then there is the revised version by Sterling of "A Pastoral," originally written as an elegiac tribute to Pope in 1744, and in the new version published in the American Magazine for May 1758. It is in two parts, the first an early statement of nationalism or the translatio studii theme, recalling Berkeley'S "Verses on the Prospect of Planting the Arts and Learning in America," and the second part a rather conventional pastoral elegy la menting the death of Alexis, or Alexander Pope. Part Two consists of a mournful dialogue between the shepherds Palremon and Moeris, with references to Colin, lines from Pope's own second pastoral in imitation of Virgil's ninth, and allusion to Pope's great translation of Homer. The elegy itself also represents the translatio theme, for with the death of Pope the muses have left Britain for America.119 There are other epitaphs and brief elegies of serious import in Maryland newspapers and manuscript archives, but the principal remaining verse in the elegiac form is burlesque or satire. One allied piece is Dr. Adam Thomson's "Verses occasioned by Mr. Colley Cibber's Epitaph on Mr. Pope," which appeared in the Maryland Gazette of November 8, 1745, signed "Philo-Musus." This is a vigorous but not especially graceful attack on Cibber's mock-epitaph, which is printed with it.120 Despite its invective, it is not as effective as such Tuesday Club pieces as "Lugubris Cantus"
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Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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