Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· 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"