Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
markedly colonial, and the butts of his satire are, like those of Samuel
Butler in Hudibras, the Puritans who lived around him, in his case significantly
the American variety. He had already participated in the Maryland
Proprietary-Puritan pamphlet warfare of the r650s when he came to
write this history-description promotion piece, by which he is best remembered.
His earlier Hammond vs Heamans (London, [r655}) is one of
the most effective vitriolic partisan tracts of seventeenth-century America,
and its effectiveness may have inspired him to write the milder and quite
different though kindred Leah and Rachel.
Leah and Rachel is genuinely American, Moses Coit Tyler and others
have thought, because of its colloquialisms and specifically American subject
matter and presentation of peculiarly colonial problems and situations.
The butts of Hammond's ridicule are earlier "lying" pamphleteers on the
Chesapeake colony such as William Bullock (r649 ), the roaring tavern
frequenters among the dissolute clergy from England who were compelled
to depart, the London human beasts of burden too timid or stupid
to attempt a better living in America, and of course the Chesapeake
Puritan communities and individuals. But the satiric quality should not
be overstressed, for Hammond's general tone is optimistic and goodnatured.64
Seventeenth-century Maryland, and southern colonial writing for that
matter, is well represented, possibly best represented, in George Alsop's A
Character of the Province of Mary-Land (London, r666), some of the
serious verses from which have been noted above. Though allegedly intended
like Hammond's book as promotion, its tone and impression are
those of an exercise in wit and satire, in both its prose and its verse. Its
language is not nearly so plain as Hammond's. In fact, Alsop's style is
baroque or euphuistic, a belated example of a popular Jacobean form
of writing from the earlier seventeenth century. But with the elaborate low
style of Thomas Nashe of an earlier period are combined Restoration
frankness about sex, and an elaborate word-play in puns, colloquialisms,
and folk sayings that might have had earlier or contemporary models.
The London-born Alsop had served an apprenticeship in England and
a four-years indenture in Maryland (probably as a clerk) before he returned
to Great Britain and wrote ostensibly at Lord Baltimore's request
this piece aimed to support the Proprietorship. Even more than Hammond,
Alsop was an ardent royalist, and like Hammond he was an
orthodox Anglican. Alsop was a free man by r662 and was still in Maryland
in 1663 and probably in r664. A Character is certainly the most curious
and delightful of all seventeenth-century promotion tracts. He called
it "A Character" surely in the contemporary sense of the verbal portrait,
or abstract character sketch, normally satiric (see the later William Byrd
r349