Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
Purely religious verse is rarer in eighteenth-century Maryland than in
most other southern colonies, though Lewis' A Rhapsody and Alexander
Hamilton's "To Philosophy, a Hymn" are meditations on a perhaps pantheistic
concept of the universe. The Reverend Thomas Cradock did publish
his A New Version of the Psalms, first printed in London in 1754 and then
in Annapolis in slightly differing form in 1756. This is an attempt to put
the Latin verse of George Buchanan (1506-1582 ) into English. The
American version seems to have been successful in at least some respects,
for the list of subscribers, headed by the name of Governor Horatio Sharpe,
reads like a who's who of colonial Maryland and parts of Virginia and
Pennsylvania.229 Since it is an eighteenth-century rendition of Renaissance
Latin, it represents at least two southern traditions, the classical and the
religious. Not at all bad iambic pentameter couplet in meter, it lacks the
flow and imaginative imagery of George Sandys' paraphrases of a century
before.
Cradock was probably the author of a religious poem published in the
American Magazine of September 1758 (I, 605-607 ), uTo Thyrsis," an
eighty-three line poem which is a kind of sermon in verse. Among Cradock's
manuscript remains are other religious verses, probably the best of
which is his "Hymn for Christmas," worth comparing with James Reid's
"Ode" on the same subject and with some of Davies' hymns. Cradock also
wrote "Hymn for Whitsunday," "Sacramental Hymn," and "On Viewing
the Grave of [his son} Arthur Cradock." Near the end of his life, he composed
the serenely meditative five-stanza hymn he called "Resignation." 23()
When all Cradock's devotional or religious verse is collected and printed,
he should stand with John Wesley and Samuel Davies as a major colonial
hymnologist.
There are a few Maryland verses on aspects of science, including agriculture,
but no one of them seems especially significant of anything save
the interests of the day. In 1728 in Dublin before he came to America
James Sterling had brought out a poem on the art of printing which he
enlarged and revised in Maryland and published in the American Magazine
and Monthly Chronicle (I [March 1758}, 281-290) under the title
of UA Poem. On the Inventions of Letters and the Art of Printing: Addrest
to Mr. Richardson in London." 231 It is easily the most distinguished poem
appearing in that periodical, most critics who know the journal agree.
Richardson, Cadmus, and other historical or mythological contributors
to the advancement of the art are addressed or referred to, and Sterling
lists the great achievements in scholarship, religious education, and science
which have been made possible through the press. A series of learned notes
refers to many printers. The poem is organized around two themes: the
invention of letters and the rise of printing. The revised version is one of
1470