Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
his "Turn." The bereft lover decides to remove to the frontier, where he
will mark trees with the story of his fond love: "Meanwhile, Scotch-Irish
shall my socials be / Wild as they are, quite good enough for me." And a
note states, "Great numbers of these Gentry [live} in the back parts of the
Provinces and 'tis hard to say whether the Indians or they are the greater
savages."
Travesties of Virgil though these eclogues may be, they are in their subjects
obviously concerned with major problems of the Chesapeake society,
problems on which Cradock already had preached. And they augment our
knowledge of southern colonial society in several ways. One must agree
with Skaggs that there is no double satire here as there probably is in
Cook and Alsop and some of Cradock's contemporaries, for the poet is too
earnest to be satirizing British ideas of America. He means to show the
weaknesses of his province and like Pope or Brown thereby correct them.
The poet's warmer side, showing his genuine affection for the natural world
and even provincial society around him, appears more elaborately in his
sermons and other poems, published and unpublished. But here he romanticizes
the wronged noble savage, shows the English-stock provincial's
mixture of admiration and disdain for the aggressive Scotch-Irish who were
our great frontiersmen, depicts Negro slaves who were happy and docile
though aware of their social disadvantages (Pompey and Sambo and the
banjo were to become stock elements of later American humorous literature
) , and even makes some feeble attempt (Eclogue 3) to have his personae
(convict servants) speak in character, or in a semiliterate English
dialect. The couplets vary in quality, though the imagery of American
nature is several times handled with imagination and sensitivity. Cradock
is not the poetic satirist even his contemporaries Jonas Green and Dr.
Hamilton are, but he is in the main tradition of performing the function
of "guardian of the public weal" at the same time that he is portraying
America.
The other Chesapeake satirist, connected with Maryland just before the
Revolution and earlier with Virginia, was clergyman Loyalist Jonathan
Boucher (1738-18°4), who had been a leader of the Homony Club, a
successor to the Tuesday Club, in the years just before the Revolution.
In his later Reminiscences of an American Loyalist (Boston, 1925 ) he notes
that he composed some verses for theatrical prologues in Annapolis, and
there are probably other verses of his in the Maryland and Virginia Gazettes.
He wrote much else, but here one is interested in "Absence, a Pastoral:
drawn from the life, from the manners, customs, and phraseology of
planters (or to speak more pastorally, of the rural swains ) inhabiting the
Banks of the Potomac in Maryland."
In his last years in England Boucher was making a glossary of provincial
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