Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH ·
and archaic words, and the poem just mentioned he may have written
then. But its subject and substance-the American Indian-derived words,
the Americanized rustic slang and dialect, even the very situation of the
simple planters described-would argue that at least in first draft the poem
was composed while he was still in Maryland. Resurrected and printed
in Joseph Stevenson, ed., Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1833),
it is a significant contribution to early American dialect and is especially
interesting as satire on the colonial southern rustic. The poem appears
with dialect words italicized and Boucher's notes explaining their meaning.
For example,
Strolling, last fall, by yon pacosen side,
Coil'd in a heap, a rattle-snake I spied:
Was it for me a rompus then to make?
The bumpkin BiUsey proceeds to lament the absence of his beloved MoUsey.
In one passage enumerating American dishes he somewhat anticipates Barlow's
Hasty-Pudding:
For breakfast, mush and th' top 0 ' milk's a treat
Or bonny clabber with molasses sweet:
At dinner, let me that best buck-skin dish,
Broth made of bacon, cream, and eke cat-fish
With toss'em boys, and belly bacon see
Cushie, and dough-boys, and small homony:
And he concludes with a reminder that this is a comic pastoral, with the
unletter'd shepherd introducing the reader to the American language.96
Mid-century South Carolina continued to produce verse imitative of the
British in form, including all the variations of the satiric. Epigrams after
Latin models, with references to Charleston ladies and the headdresses and
costumes of the period, are in spirit one of the lightest of these forms. Along
with them went the penchant for pastoral trappings such as has just been
shown in Maryland verses. The mock-heroic, sometimes inspired by local
gossip, continued. In the Stamp Act period Philo-Patrire, political satirist,
composed "On liberty-Tree." Actually better poetry is to be found in the
mock-heroic verses "The Paper Mill," by a Joseph Dumbleton (fl. 1740-
1750), who published in both Virginia and South Carolina and was prob­
ably a native of Gloucestershire. "Inscribed to Mr. Parks," the lines ap­
peared first in the Virginia Gazette of July 1744. Celebrating the printer's
establishment of his own paper manufactory, the poem is replete with
double entendres and exalted phrases and puns. Partially it is a plea for
linen rags.