Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belietristic .
that friends who had borrowed books please return them-and he lists the
titles.
Believed to be his is a rather wistful manuscript poem containing
scathing remarks about his businesslike "master" (and actually close
friend ), Robert Morris, and his own hatred of commerce. This is in
effect a brooding satire directed against commerce and the business world
by a man who would have preferred a life of contemplation.93 There is
humor in places, and Callister's letters show that he could be a merry man,
a conclusion supported by a Hudibrastic I752 epistolary poem from
"Charles Payne" (Thomas Bacon ) to Callister, "A Letter Originally wrote
Three Thousand years ago, By that Famous Laughing Sage & Philosopher
Democritus to a Friend at Aulis . .. ," purportedly translated in the reign
of Charles II and now adapted to the present age. Its tone is set in the first
lines :
Charles to Henry, Sendeth greeting,
Dear Sirl And so forth is fitting,
I wish we had a Merry Meeting.
I've sent your Miss Clarissa Harlot,
(Pox take me for a Blundering Varlet!
Harlow, I mean, in Seven Books
Of Pyeous Use for Pastry Cooks.
And the poem wanders on for four foolscap sheets, with learned prose
notes at the bottom of each page, and specific references to fruit trees and
pruning, to fiddles or composers such as Purcell, to flutes and Cicero, to
local families of prominence such as Goldsborough and Tilghman, to
medicine and physicians. In the notes are learned and quasi-learned allu­
sions, including a lengthy passage in Greek.
Signior Lardini handled his satiric couplets almost as capably as his
violin and his often-printed sermons. Local gossip and the two men's common
interests are followed by what may be the principal point of the poem
--certainly its sharpest satire--on one Doctor K-llm-n (Dr. Killman? )
who intends to reorganize or reduce the laws according to medical theory
and practice. The ridicule of false learning and the style are firmly in the
Scriblerian tradition of the time. When one recalls that Bacon was the next
year to begin his own compilation of the laws of Maryland, one becomes
aware that the ridicule in this work sprang from the author's own special
interests.94 This is the first "public" intimation that he was planning the
legal work.
Then there was the poet, physician, and pamphleteer Dr. Adam Thom­
son, close friend of Dr. Hamilton, who wrote under the pseudonyms Philo­
Musaeus and Town Side. Though much of his verse probably remains un-
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