Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
r d have you once again to try,
I've reason that I can't disclose
For thinking you the Man she chose:
As to that foolish secret Lye
We'll find the truth on't bye & bye.226
Among miscellaneous verses Green printed only a few of several patriotic
pieces of the period 1752-1760. One printed elsewhere was James
Sterling's An Epistle to the Hon. Arthur Dobbs, Esq.: in Europe from a
Clergyman in America (Dublin and London, 1752), a major poem of the
era possessing special interest because of Dobbs' later governorship in
North Carolina. In his prose "Advertisement" Sterling states that he wrote
it two years before, after the return of the two Dobbs ships from their attempt
to discover the Northwest Passage. The ships' objective brought to
the poet's mind the potential of a great British empire in America. Referring
to himself as a "tuneful Savage" living in the "uncultured Paradise"
of America, the quondam Irish playwright reveals himself as far more
American in his identity than he did in the "Epithalamium." The topography
and fertility of his Chesapeake province are principal topics, and the
rivers Chester and Susquehannah, Niagara Falls, the Appalachian Mountains,
and his own "green Arcadia" are genuinely of the New World. In an
imagined speech of Dobbs' praising the red men, the poet places the Indians
in the pastoral tradition as representing a stage in mankind's development
and declares that they were happy before the white man
reached America. But the influence of Thomson and the new school of
sensibility are also evident in this poem on an American subject.
Sterling goes on to describe a whale splashing waves over Dobbs' ship
and the ice and cold of Labrador. Then after predicting a future triumphant
journey for Dobbs, the poet breaks off or interrupts to present his idea of
creation and later compliments various British notables and noblemen
of the time. Though it is not so genuinely natural as Lewis' best work, in
its own time the Monthly Review called it a good "mixture of the heroic,
the philosophical, the descriptive, and the ethic." 227 Its incipient Americanism
in the Indian section and its vision of the future glory of America
make it historically important though not intrinsically good art.
The Reverend Thomas Bacon's son John, a young lieutenant in the
militia who was killed in action before 1756, is believed to have been the
author of "A Recruiting Song for the Maryland Independent Company
(By an Officer of the Company) ," printed in the Maryland Gazette of
September 19, 1754, and in the Scot's Magazine (XVIII (March 1755},
139-14°). Eleven stanzas together with varying choruses make this a
good rollicking drinking song nicely representative of the patriotic spirit