Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
Green was probably the author of a burlesque essay and a humorous
letter printed in 175 I. His anniversary odes continued through the years
at least through 1754, along with "A Mournful Episode" and a "Lamen­
tation" and other burlesque verses. He may have been the author of a
delightful occasional piece in the Maryland Gazette of August 22, 1754,
"Memorandum for a Seine-Hauling, in Severn River, near a delightful
Spring at the foot of Constitution Hill" in the manner of Matthew Prior,
though there is some evidence pointing to member William Thornton as
the author. Typical of Green was the poem he read on September 24,
1754, ttA Tragical and Heroic Episode on the Club Tobacco Box, Pyrated
by the Chancellor." In 1758 he published a punning, humorous essay,
"Properties of a Gardiner," which appears to be his own. In the Stamp Act
controversy he employed his punning satire against the act and seems to
have sided with the popular party.
As Lemay has suggested, Green and his friend Hamilton, along with
their fellows and even more than the earlier Cook, display in their burles­
ques of serious genres an ultrasophistication not perhaps to be expected in
the supposedly backward colonies. Green mocks the forms and ideals of
contemporary English society and employs local and frequently peculiarly
American subjects, and at the same time often produces the belly laughs
which were to be the hallmark reactions to later American humor.
Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712-1756), as noted recorder-satirist and
poet of the Tuesday Club, son of a distinguished professor at the Univer­
sity of Edinburgh and an M.D. of that Scottish university, was the brother
of Dr. John Hamilton, who had settled in Calvert County by 1722. Dr.
Alexander Hamilton arrived in Maryland early in 1739 and soon had a
lucrative practice, but he was plagued from the beginning by the disease
which eventually killed him, probably tuberculosis. In his first year in
Maryland he was writing nostalgically back to another brother Gavin
about Edinburgh social life, including the Whin-bush Club. By 1743 his
health was so poor he planned to leave the New World, but for various
reasons stayed on. In 1744, in an attempt to recover his health, he decided
to make a summer excursion to the northern colonies, a journey which re­
sulted in one of the most entertaining and well written of colonial travel
accounts, his Itinerarium, which has been printed twice in this century.
Though not basically a satire, the irony and wit, the burlesque exaggeration
and incorporated tall tale, give it an important place in the American
humorous tradition.91
Hamilton kept a diary on the long trip to New England, describing
with amusement men and manners and architecture and anecdotes he ob­
served or heard as he rode along. Everywhere he was amused and often
bemused by what he saw and by what people took him to be. Usually
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