Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
above that author claimed to be a native of Carolina, and Kirkpatrick
was not.268
The Gazette between 1740 and 1755 carried a few narrative and ballad
pieces. The only original narrative poem of any length is Joseph Dumbleton's
"The Northern Miracle," a Rabelaisian tale in a rural setting in
Northumberland. A friar and a tongue-in-cheek miracle are the elements
of this piece published January 8, 1750. Probably not of local origin is
"Insulted Poverty: Or, the Case is Altered. A Tale," March 27, 1745, nor
is the briefer ballad "The Countryman's Lamentation" of September 30,
1745, probably colonial. And though "On Vice-Admiral Vernon's taking
Porto Bello," to "the Tune of -Sally" (June 14, 1740), was a ballad
reflecting a strong South Carolina interest in the War of Jenkins' Ear, there
is no evidence that it was a local contribution. If "A Black Joak Blazing,
or, The secret History of Caesar & Dianna, A Poem Humbly inscribed to
Miss Bold-J oak" which was advertised to be printed in the December 5,
1741, issue, had appeared there would have been another locally authored
ballad, obviously satirical, published in the colony.
Perhaps the most ambitious of South Carolina narrative verses was
The Sea-Piece: A Narrative, philosophical and Descriptive POEM. In Five
Cantos, published in London by James Kirkpatrick, M.D., in 1750. In 1749
the physician had published separately Canto II and evidently received
sufficient encouragement to bring out the whole, with a fulsome and
lengthy dedicatory epistle to Commodore George Townshend, who had
brought Kirkpatrick and his family back to England. The dedication of
twenty-five pages is followed by a preface of twenty-three, and although
both these prose passages are in general effect quite tedious, they tell the
reader a good deal about the author, including his classical learning, the
object of the poem, and his critical theory regarding such verse.
The Sea-Piece was received and read in Great Britain and in the colonies
in its time and in fact is one of the principal eighteenth-century efforts by
a colonial to produce a major poem, though its composition was perhaps
largely in Britain. It is a topographical poem of the subspecies seapiece, as
its title indicates, and as its author indicates in his prose comments that it
represents a modern attempt in an ancient form. In the dedication he de­
clares that aboard the Tartar from Carolina he received from his patron
an instruction in "maritime Images and Observations" which greatly en­
riched his verses. Among other digressions in this dedication, the physician­
poet mentions and quotes Addison's Cato, Pope's Iliad, and his own
Nonpareil mentioned above.
In his preface the writer finds it difficult accurately to classify his poem
as nautical, didactic, or representing precisely any one of the descriptive
terms he employs in the title. He confesses that he had composed a shorter