Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally BeUetristic .
ried a fair amount of miscellaneous verse, including some of Lewis' and
Cook's and a piece by a "John Smith" of Cecil County on longitude and
the Seagood-Blackamore poem from Virginia.225
In Green's paper were a number of more or less conventional verses
on ladies, love, and marriage. On May 18, 1748, James Sterling's "An
Epithalamium on the late Marriage of the Honourable BENEDICT
CALVERT, Esq.; with the agreeable young lady, of your City, his Kinswoman."
The opening lines ostensibly celebrate Maryland's spring, but
"feather'd Warblers charm th' inchanted Grove" and other such imagery
indicate how conventionally English that poem is. Fourteen lines precede
Sterling's first use of a local name, the river Severn, and most of the verses
are crowded with classical allusion including mythology, the obvious
pastoral trappings, and the grandiose image. Notes by the author explain
what he considered too learned for most of his readers. Severn, Annapolis,
Marylandia, and "Chesapeak" are almost the only American names or
references in a poem which might as well have been written in England
or Ireland. But it is datelined "Kent County," and it remains as one of the
few really formal epithalamia written and published in eighteenth-century
America, all together not a bad poem.
The first verse appearing in Green's Gazette, however, was the unidentified
"Juba's" forty-five line "To the Ladies of Maryland" in the issue of
June 1 4, 1745. In one sense it may be the beginning of the southern tradition
of the chivalric lyrics to ladies, but as might be expected in the age in
which it appeared, it is a mockingly "moral" bit of instruction which
praises and criticizes at once. On January 4, 1759, "Cynthio" was represented
by fifty-eight lines of good verse, "A Batchelor's address, or, Proposal
to the Maidens." The tone is light, though hardly mocking:
Ye Maids, whom Nature meant for Mothers,
Some fair, some brown, and browner others,
From Fifteen up to Five and Twenty,
(Of those above there's always plenty)
She who these Virtues shall inherit,
A Batchelor wou'd strive to merit.
With these poems to or regarding ladies might be noted the "Extempore"
versified advice Henry Callister gave his young friend Henry Hollyday on
June 27, 1 748:
My dear, my good & generous Friend
You do not need to apprehend
That Cloe has discarded you
For any other Youth in view.
If you are serious, so am I,