Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
for March 1836 (II, 258) was a fragment of another translation by
Eastern Shore colonial official Godfrey Pole, and from the records it appears
that Pole's complete translation had been sent to the Virginia Historical
Society in that year. The original Latin poem had been one of the
two "tributes" paid by the College of William and Mary to the governor
as quitrent for lands granted by the Crown to the College. Printed only
thirteen years after the event it celebrates, the Blackamore-Seagood poem
may be one reason for the glamor since surrounding the history of the
expedition.255
Then about 1730 Dr. Mark Bannerman of Middlesex County in Virginia
sent to his friend Allan Ramsay a few graceful little lines complimenting
the Scottish poet for his "lays." Ramsay printed the Virginia verses
in Tea-Table MisceUany (London, 1730, 12th ed. 1760 ).256
Nor only do your lays o'er Britain flow,
Round all the globe your happy sonnets go.
Here thy soft verse made to a Scottish air,
Are often sung by our Virginia fair.
John Markland (fl. 1723-1734), apparently an attorney and former
Cambridge University student, published two occasional poems of some
interest during his years in Virginia. He seems to have been the author of
several things before he left Britain, including a collection Cytheria: or
New Poems upon Love and Intrigue (London, 1723) composed principally
of his own work, Three New Poems (London, 1721) by himself and
others, and An Ode on the Happy Birth of the Young Princess (London,
1723). He was a versifier of some ability, the contemporary of the playwright
Dr. Henry Potter and the Reverend William Dawson in the 1730S
in the Williamsburg neighborhood. Markland's Typographia. An Ode,
on Printing, Inscrib'd to the Honourable William Gooch, Esq . . . was the
nrst known poem printed by William Parks in Virginia, in 1730, long before
he began the Virginia Gazette. Occasioned by the setting up of the
printing press in Williamsburg, this is an ambitious ode of the neoclassical
tradition in twelve parts, mentioning the classics, especially Pindar, and
Addison and Dryden and Oxford and Cambridge. It includes tributes to
the King, really thanks for having sent Gooch as his viceroy, and to
Parks and his press, along with a declaration of what they will mean to the
colony. The most sententious verse is perhaps in part XII, beginning
Happy the Art, by which we learn
The Gloss of Errors to detect,
The Vice of Habits to correct,
And sacred Truths, from Falshood to discern!