Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
count together are his finest writing. But he did compose other things, including
the medical defense of Dr. Adam Thomson mentioned above and
a great deal of still not specifically identified writing in Annapolis and
Philadelphia periodicals and probably in the Gentleman's and Scot's Magazines.
Lemay has definitely identified as Hamilton's a number of humorous
and satiric verses and essays printed in colonial newspapers. In the Maryland
Gazette of January 7, 1746, the physician satirized in a prose essay
the rustic manners, inquisitiveness, and democratic tendencies of Americans
(he had touched on all these in other forms in the Itinerarium), in all
three anticipating the earlier nineteenth-century educated native humorists
and foreign visitors such as Sir Augustus John Foster (1804-1812), when
peculiarly Yankee inquisitiveness elicited sharp resentment and replies.92
Published in the Maryland Gazette of June 29, 1748, is perhaps the
colony'S ablest belletristic essay, a critical survey of Maryland writers a:ld
writing which had appeared in that periodical. Signed is the pseudonym
of the seventeenth-century Spanish author Don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas.
Here Hamilton evaluates all the local prose and verse, political and
more purely artistic, which had appeared during Green's editorship. He
seems to have read a complete file of the journal, perhaps the still-preserved
copy of Green himself. There are echoes of Lucianic satire or its English
derivatives of the preceding century, the dialogue genre of question and
answer, and a mock-Dantesque tour through hell guided by the Maryland
Virgil, Jonas Green. Green is depicted as a congenial and humorous
companion, but several aspersions are cast on his foibles. The frame of the
essay is the dream-vision such as Addison had used in the Spectator and
many other authors before and after Hamilton have employed. Beginning
with the customary epistolary address to "Mr. Green," the writer tells of his
falling asleep while going through a bundle of old Maryland papers.
He "wakes" to find himself in a great hall crowded with poets, politicians,
and philosophers, all busy in disputing, reciting, composing, or dispatching
"pacquets" to editor Green. Virgil-Green explains to the narrator or persona
who "these odd Fellows [are}, and what they are about." Green, or
rather Hamilton, strikes off each likeness concisely but vividly and perceptively.
Among those judged with perceptive fairness, as far as we now
know their work, is the Reverend James Sterling, called the major poet of
the province and a "romantic" (apparently an early use of the term in its
later sense ). Though Hamilton may have been unduly impressed by Sterling's
poems and plays published in Dublin and London long before, at
that time, possibly excepting Green or Hamilton, Sterling was indeed probably
the ablest poet of Maryland. The narrator suggests that Sterling be
"crowned Poet Laureate of Maryland."
There follows an appreciation of the verses of Hamilton's old school-