Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
may have felt it necessary or at least expedient to employ specific references
to other conflicts to emphasize his second purpose, the universal.
In the so-called Third Edition of The Sotweed Factor Cook did amend
a great deal. The ridicule of the Quakers is altered so that cheating Scotch.
Irish planters are his targets, and an entirely new conclusion, invoking a
blessing on the land and its present and future inhabitants, makes this
version a relatively goodnatured mock-heroic poem. It is historically and
personally in contrast to the first edition, and one would like to know why
the old poet watered down the bawdy slashing Hudibrastic earlier poem
to a mild caricature of the Maryland microcosm.
There is no further satire by Cook. But the self-styled poet laureate
of Maryland will be remembered for The Sot-Weed Factor in its first
version. Lively and thoroughly American in its subject matter, it has qualities
of caricature and mocking satire to appear again and again in later New
W orId literature. Since most of his work survives in unique printed copies
or manuscripts and few later writers until recently refer to him, it is not
likely that he influenced the development of American humorous tradition.
But he certainly represented it. In his own day, at least two fellow poets
knew his work, John Fox of Virginia and Richard Lewis of Maryland, the
latter of whom had published a quite different kind of satire before Cook's
later work appeared.
Richard Lewis, educator, natural historian, poet of nature, will be con
sidered later for his contributions to other kinds of belletristic writing. But
his first Maryland published work is his translation into English of Edward
Holdsworth's Latin satire Muscipula: The Mouse-Trap, OR The Battle
of the Cambrians and the Mice (Annapolis, 1728). This handsome printed
volume with rubricated title page is the first known belletristic work ac­
tually published in the southern colonies. Dedicated to Benedict Leonard
Calvert, it has elaborate antiquarian notes and champions Wales and
Welshmen. Thoroughly conscious of the literary theory of his time, in his
preface Lewis states that the verse "is of the Mock Heroic, or Burlesque
Kind, of which there are two Sorts." One is of ludicrous action in heroic
verse, as The Rape of the Lock; the other in odd meters debases some great
event, as Hudibras. Lewis goes on to defend his choice of subject and of
this particular original and also defends the whole concept of the usefulness
of translation. He concludes his preface by declaring his purpose of en­
couraging the cultivation of polite literature in Maryland. And he assures
the reader that Holdsworth actually intended the work as a panegyric on
the antiquity and skill in the mechanic arts of the Cambrians rather than
a satire upon them. In the dedicatory poem to Calvert he defends and
exhorts the American muse with an argument used by New World writers
for at least a century after this work: " 'To Raise the Genius' WE no Time
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