Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN TH E COLONIAL SOUTH '
fellow and medical colleague Dr. Adam Thomson, incidentally identifying
several poems in the Gazette as Thomson's. Hamilton mentions ttJ uba,"
whose bestknown piece on the ladies has in our time been reprinted in at
least two anthologies; ridicules the ecclesiastical-political prose of "Philanthropos"
(the Reverend Jacob Henderson) ; calls Ignotus a puny
ttTranslator" (today the piece's author is usually thought to have been the
James Sterling praised earlier ); judges other pseudonymous pieces probably
written by one of the "Baltimore Bards," the Reverends Thomas
Chase and Thomas Cradock; and notes many other political and moral
pieces of less consequence. In the course of the tour, the narrator is presented
a little ticket depicting "a Monkey riding a winged Ass, and in the
offskip, Mount Parnassus reversed, with its double Top wrapt in a thick
black Cloud." This is the badge which makes him a member of the brotherhood
of authors. Finally appears grave and stately Public Opinion, who
sneers at all Green's authors, "who have nothing but the Money [they pay
to be published] to recommend them."
This essay is not so light and relatively spontaneous as Hamilton's
"History" or his Itinerarium, but it has some significance as early criticism
and as humor, for it is good-natured comedy throughout. It was by no
means the last of the physician's shorter pieces, for there survive several
serious poems and brief essays. Though he is perhaps the earliest American
to appreciate New World scenery in prose, he will in the end be remembered
for his contributions in the humorous and satiric forms of his day to
the depiction of the social and intellectual life of the Chesapeake coloniesonce
all of his work can be got into print. For like some earlier writers including
Cook, he in several respects worked out his American identity by
treating ironically and humorously both Americans and British ideas of
Americans. The Itinerarium represents close observation and an empathy
with his fellow colonials even outside his own province. The Gazette
pieces and the unpublished Tuesday Club manuscripts would have been
for his contemporary fellow Scots and Englishmen uncomfortably mocking
reminders of what they then were or their literary history had been in the
past. In pun, anecdote, burlesque song or society, the peculiarly American
twist is here. Hamilton would not and could not have composed his records
and histories if he had not come to the colonies.
Outside the Tuesday Club circle, or on its outskirts, were a few other men
with a gift for verse, humor, and satire. Henry Callister (c. 1716-after
1765 ), Eastern Shore tobacco factor and musician and friend of the Reverend
Thomas Bacon mentioned in the preceding chapter, was among other
things a versifier and epistolarian. His letters afford abundant evidence of
the whimsical nature of this sensitive man. There is, for instance, an amusing
notice of his in the Maryland Gazette (February 10, 1757) requesting