History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884, Part 61

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898. cn; Westcott, Thompson, 1820-1888, joint author
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : L. H. Everts & Co.
Number of Pages: 992

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" Let none condemn this undertaking, In silent thoughts or noiny speaking ; They're fools whose bolt's soon shot upon The mark they've looked but little on."

Quarrels of this kind were in Arcadia, and so they must be even at Parnassus. Philadelphia, it ap- peared, was yet not large enough to be able to afford two laureate wreaths at the same time, and another poet-printer, Jacob Taylor, contested arduously for the one the city had for bestowal. There was another spur to this rivalry besides the struggle for mere poetic fame. Jacob Taylor was also a school-master as well as printer and poet, and his verses must be employed to serve as well higher and spiritual pur- poses, that of assisting the business at which he made his bread. He attacked his rival both in prose (in the columns of the Mercury) and in verse. In the former medium, among other things, he says, "Thy constant care and labour is to be thought a finished philosopher and universal scholar, never for- getting to talk of the Greek and Hebrew, and other Oriental tongues, as if they were as natural to thee as hooting to an owl." This prose assault is followed, as was his rival's first advertisement, by verses in the same vein :

" A school for thee ! a miost commodious place To nod and wiak, and print with such a graca,- Thy black disciples, now immured in folly, Shall start our clarks, and read and speak like Tully ; Tha preference to the sable sort belongs ; The white man naxt must learn the sacred tongues. Thus in just order are thy legione led To realms of science,-Keimer at their head."

Franklin has much to say that is entertaining of his old employer ; among other things, his plan for their joint founding of a new religions sect, in which Keimer was to preach the doctrines and Franklin to undertake the confutation of those who should assail it. Two of his most essential principles were the re- garding of the seventh day as the Sabbath, and always wearing a beard, adopting literally the order in the Mosaic eanon, "Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard." Franklin pretended to agree to his terms upon condition of the adoption of another essential, that of abstaining from animal food. After some remonstrance upon the score of health, the prophet agreed to this. The account of the ending of this pious projeet is given in Franklin's autobiography : "Ile was usually a great glutton, and I promised my- self some diversion in half starving him. Ile agreed

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to try the practice if I would keep him company. I did so, and he held it for three months. We had our victuals dressed and brought to us regularly by a woman in the neighborhood, who had from me a list of forty dishes to be prepared for us at different times, in all which there was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, and the whim suited me the better at this time from the cheapness of it, not costing us above eigh- teen pence sterling a week. I have since kept several Lents most strictly, leaving the common diet for that, and that for the common, abruptly, without the least inconvenience, so that I think there is little in the advice of making these changes by easy gradations. I went on pleasantly, but poor Keimer suffered griev- ously, tired of the project, longed for the flesh-pots of Egypt, and ordered a roast pig. He invited me and two women friends to dine with him, but it being brought too soon upon the table, he could not resist the temptation, and ate the whole before we came."

Having learned that Franklin intended to start a newspaper, Keimer anticipated him, and set up one himself in 1728, under the name of The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences, and Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin, resenting the treatment he had received from him, berated his enterprise very effec- tively over the signature of " Busybody," in The Mer- cury. It fell through in less than a year, and Keimer emigrated to Barbadoes. The last of the productions of his genius that the world is acquainted with is an elegiac poem, of thirty or forty lines, from The Bar- badoes Gazette of May, 1734. The following is the announcement and the first four lines :

"To those would be thought gentlemen, who have long takeu this paper and never paid for it, and seem never to desigo to pay for it.

"The Sorrowful Lamentation of Samuel Keimer, printer of the Bar- badoes Gazette.

" What & pity it is that some uiodern bravadoes, Who dub themselves gentlemen here in Barbadoes, Should time after time run in debt to their printer, And care not to pay him in summer or winter."1

Jacob Taylor kept the ground after the departure of Keimer. In 1728 he published a descriptive poem, " Pennsylvania," and the "Story of Whackum." A nameless bard thus praised him in The Mercury in his old age:

" With years oppress'd and compass'd round with woes, A muse with fire fraught yet Taylor shows; His fancy's bold, harmonious are his lays, And were he more correct, lie'd reach the bays."

The main reputation that Taylor enjoyed during his life was as a maker of almanacs. These were the media for the transmission of literary fame. In this line he was accounted the best before Franklin.

Keimer's was not the only elegy upon the untimely death of Aquila Rose, so happily named. One Elias

Bockett, of London, wrote one in what Keimer was free to admit was " a melting, florid strain." And yet there was another, by a bard whose modesty prevented his making known the name of the one who had wept in poetic words at the tomb of the friend whom he styled Myris. The "Elegy on the Sight of Myris' Tomb" is thus prefaced : "The following lines were left with the printer by an intimate friend of A. R., deceased, who, touching at Philadelphia on his way to Great Britain, had but time to hear a relation of his friend's death, view the place of his interment, and write, without revising even, the following lines." The · poet, after invoking the upper and inferior gods, dryads, and nymphs of forest aud sea, addresses the river Delaware in such strain as the following:

" With pleasure we behold, O Delaware! Thy woody banks become the Muse's care ; Thy docile youth were with her beauty fired, And folly, vice, and ignorance retired; And bad but Myris lived, we hoped to see A new Arcadia to arise ou thee."

The three who with Keimer were most prominent in the small literary circle of Philadelphia when Franklin returned from his visit to England were George Webb, Joseph Breintnal, and James Ralph. Webb had been an Oxford student, who, fired with ambition for the stage, ran away to London, where, having been reduced to great straits, he bound himself to service in America. Franklin found him, when about eighteen years old, with Keimer, who had bought the remainder of his term from his master, and finally made him his partner. It was he who had betrayed to Keimer Franklin's project of setting up a newspaper, and thus enabled the former to take the initiative. Webb was a person of considerable talent, hut this was wasted by a life which exhibited no steadi- ness of purpose and little of moral principle. A poem is preserved, called "The Bachelor's Hall," which evinces poetical gift of respectable degree.

Joseph Breintnal is represented by Franklin as " a copyer of deeds for the scriveners, a good natured, friendly, middle-aged man ; a great lover of poetry, reading all he could meet with, and writing some that was tolerable; very ingenious in many little knick- knackeries, and of sensible conversation." Yet, except for Franklin's autobiography, we probably should not have heard either of him or Webb, as, like the petty boaster whom Themistocles in so few words silenced, they were great only because they dwelt in Seniphus. Not that there are not specimens of their effusions. A copy of The Mercury for 1731 contains a satirical poetic production by an author who, we regret, wrote anonymously. The production is entitled "The Wits and Poets of Pennsylvania." Breintnal had been a fervent admirer of Webb, and prologned his "Bachelor's Hall" with some very laudatory verses. The satirist above mentioned speaks of his poetry in this style, which, from what we have seen, we suspect to have been not far from just :

1 In Duyckinck's "Cyclopedia of American Literature" it is said, " A collection of papers from this journal was, in 1741, printed in Loudon, with the title 'Caribbeaus,' in two quarto volumes, arranged in a stiff imitation of 'The Tatler.'"

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"For choice of diction I should Breintnal chouse, For just conceptione and a ready muse ; Yet is that ninse too labored and prolix, And seldom on the wing knows where to fix. So strictly regular is every rise, IJis poems lose the beauty of surprise, In this his flame is like a kitchen fire, We see the billets last which mount it higher."

Breintnal was a contributor to The Mercury, and when Franklin ceased to assail Keimer's paper, he continued the warfare over the same signature, " Busy- Body." In the number of The Mercury for June 19, 1729, is a paper which, as included in a number of the " Busy-Body," has generally been supposed to have been contributed by him. It was written in a brief period of freedom from business engrossments, and therefore was content with a position not the highest in poetical endeavors. It is a description of Market Street. The poet, in his introduction, says of it, "A plain description of the High Street in this city ; the whole town being too great a task for his leisure." 1

James Ralph was a more considerable person than any of the others aforementioned, but, for a long time,

1 The poem thus opens :

" At Delaware's broad stream, the view begin Where jutting wharfs, food-freighted boats take in; Then, with the advancing sun direct your eye Wide opes the street with firm Brick Buildings bigh; Step, gently rising, over the Pebbly way, And in the Shops their tempting Wares display ; (Chief on the Right, screened from rude Windg & Blest In Frost with Sunshine) Here, if ails molest, Plain-surfaced Flags, and smooth-laid Bricks invite, Your tender Fert to Travel with Delight And Yew-Bow, distance, from the Key-built Strand Our Court-lumse fronts Caesarea's Pine-tree Land. Thro' the arched Dome, and on each side, the Street Divided runs, remote again to meet ; Here Enstward stand the Traps to Obloquy, And Petty Crimes,-stocke, Post, and Pillory, And (twice a week ) beyond, right stalls are set Loaded with Fruits and Fowls, and Jersey's Ment, Westward, conjoin, the Shambles grace the Court."

Further on we are told locations of prominent buildings :

" South of the mart a meeting-honee fe reared Where by the Friend (so called) is Christ revered ; With Stone and Brick the lasting walls are made, High raised the Roof, and wide the Rafters sprend. Within a voice of this, the Presbytera Of like minteriale linve erected tbrits ; Thener half a Furlong West, declining pace And see the Rock-built Prison's dreadful Face. 'Twixt and beyond all those, near twice as far As from a sling a stone might puss in air The forging shops of suoty smiths are set And Wheelwrights Frames, with vacant Lots to let. A neighbor hood of smoke and plerving Dine, From trades, from Prison Grates, and Public Inns. But even among this Noise and Dirt are placed Some Buildings fair, with peaceful Tenants graced. D staut, more West, with unbilt Groutuls between, The Farance-House and Woods close up the scene. On the other side (left in my verse dinjolaed But all one Picture in the Poet's mind) A comely low of Tenements unite And set their various goods and works to Light," etc.

was as careless and as improvident as Webb. Coarse and disgusting as are some of the accounts that Franklin gives of his intercourse with some of the earliest among those with whom he lived on terms of greatest intimacy during the first years of his resi- dence in Philadelphia, they, as a whole, are exceed- ingly interesting. Ralph, one of these, the biographer characterizes as "ingenious, gentle in his manners, and extremely eloquent; I think I never knew a prettier talker." Both Johnson and another friend (Charles Osborne, described as sensible, upright enough, but " in literary matters too fond of criticis- ing") tried to dissuade Ralph from addicting himself to poetry. "Ralph was inclined to pursue the study of poetry, not doubting but he might become eminent in it, and make his fortune by it, alleging that the best poets must, when they first begin to write, make as many faults as he did. Osborne dissuaded him, assured him he had no genius for poetry, and advised him to think of nothing beyond the business he was bred to." ... "I approved the amusing one's self with poetry now and then, so far as to improve one's language, but no farther." In spite of these dis- couraging things, Ralph was determined to be a poet, the more so from the luck he had once in obtaining the too critical Osborne's unmeasured praise of one of his effusions by leading him, through Franklin's connivance, to believe that Franklin was the author. The religious convictions of Ralph were unsettled by Franklin, as the latter said afterward, to his cost. He forsook his wife and child, accompanied Franklin on his first voyage to England, and there, though Pope killed him off as a poet, he acquired considerable fame as a political writer. He had printed a poetical squib called "Sawney," in which he undertook to ridicule Pope, Swift, and Gay. His first poem printed in England was "Night." Pope, in "The Dunciad," gave this the two lines :

"Silence, yo wolves, while Ralph to Cynthia howls,

Aud makes Night hideone. Answer him, ye Owls."

One is startled by the cool sincerity with which Franklin tells of the continued intimacy with such a man, who at one time endeavors to be an actor, then a contributor to a paper published by one Roberts, on Paternoster Row, in imitation of the Spectator, then a hackney writer for the stationers and lawyers about the Temple, and finally obtaining temporary employment as a country school-master (at sixpence each pupil a week , and hiding the disgrace of so mean a condition under the assumed name of Benja- min Franklin. Never had poet had a less encour- aging patron than Ralph in Franklin. An epic was tried in the shades of the school in Berkshire, and when extracts of it were sent to the Mæcenas in London, the latter, with his corrections and other discouraging pieces, sent one of Young's "Satires," just then published, whose verses upon the fate of authors in general he would fain have had him take

AUTHORS AND LITERATURE OF PHILADELPHIA.

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for a warning.1 He continued to woo the muses of Poetry and the Drama, in hope that they might induce Fortune to change her garments to his behold- ing. His plays, "The Fashionable Lady," "Fall of the Earl of Essex," "The Lawyer's Feast," and " The Astrologer," all broke down, in spite of the best pre- sentation Drury Lane could give them. No better fate attended his poems, " Peuma," "Clarinda," "The Muse's Address." He bade farewell to literature with a work he named " The Case of Authors Stated, with Regard to Booksellers, the Stage, and the Public." Henceforward he devoted himself to political squibs, hired, cheaply enongh, it was said, by Lord Melbourne, then prime minister, from whose service, according to Pope, he was easily bought. Had he remained in Philadelphia, and pursued a straightforward, upright course, it is probable that he would have risen to be the greatest literary man of that province during a considerable period. He was evidently a man of a high order of genius, at least for prose composition. Some time during his career he wrote a history of William of Orange, Queen Anne, and George I., which Hallam declared to be the most accurate and faithful history of those times. "My friend Ralph," said Franklin, "has kept me poor. He owed me about twenty-seven pounds, which I was now never likely to receive,-a great sum out of my small earn- ings." He must have retained to the last some of his old affection, for he tells us nearly twenty years after- ward, evidently himself pleased with the news he had to impart, "He2 gave me the first information that my old friend James Ralph was still alive, that he was esteemed one of the best political writers in England, had been employed in the dispute between Prince Frederick and the king, and had obtained a pension of three hundred a year. That his reputa- tion was indeed small as a poet, Pope having damned his poetry in the ' Dunciad,' but his prose was thought as good as any man's."

He does not say so, but we suspect the philosopher

1 The following lines seem as if they ought to have been adequate for their purpose :

" The abandoned manners of our writing train May tempt mankind to think religion vain; But in their fate, their habit, and their mien, That gods there are is evidently seen.

Heaven stands absolved by vengeance on their pen, And marks the murderers of fame from men : Through meagre jaws they draw their venal hreath, As ghostly as their brothers in Macbeth.

Their feet thro' faithless leather meets the dirt, And oftener changed their principles than shirt:

The transient vestments of these frugal men Hasten to paper for our mirth again :

Too soon (O merry, melancholy fate !) They beg in rhyme and warble thro' a grate.

The man lampooned forgets it at the sight ;

The friend thro' pity gives, the foe thro' spite ;

And though full conscious of his injured purse,

Lintot relents, nor Cecil could wish them worse."

of feeling some remorse for his part in unsettling the religious faith of the erratic man, and thus impelling him upon a career the chief part of which must prove unfortunate.

The nameless satirist of The Mercury, to whom we have before alluded, lauds very highly Henry Brooke, a young man,-who, however, was devoted rather to political than literary life. He was spoken of as a son of Sir Henry Brooke, and had come over with a commission of collector of customs at Lewistown in Sussex County. Although he continued to reside in the province until his death and acted a prominent part in politics, yet his spirit languished for want of the cultured society to which he had been accustomed. For several years he was Speaker of Assembly in the Lower Counties, and, on the establishment of Gov- ernor Keith's Court of Chancery, in 1720, was made by him a master in chancery. In a paper read at the council of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, in 1829, by Joshua Francis Fisher, it is said, " The only specimen of Brooke's poetry which I have met with is entitled ' A Discourse on Jests.' It is addressed to Mr. Robert Grace, whom Franklin describes as a 'young man of fortune, generous, animated, and witty, fond of epigrams, but more fond of his friends.' It rallies him on the subject of his darling passion in a jest with much good sense and good humor. It may be pronounced a sprightly and pleasant treatise on false wit, and proves its author to have been not only an imitator of good models, but himself the possessor of a lively wit and a refined taste." . . . " He died in 1735 in the fifty-seventh year of his age, and the General Magazine of 1741 contains a poetic tribute to his memory, which describes him as an accomplished linguist and an adept in almost every science."

Another person, doubly unfortunate, being both a country school-master and a poetaster, was William Satterthwaite. Added to these misfortunes was his marriage, contracted, after one evening's courtship, with one of his pupils while he was teaching in Eng- land. The imprudence of this step, apparent both to husband and wife, induced them to emigrate to Penn- sylvania, where the former drew what comfort he could with a poorly-paying vocation and an ill-tempered sponse, in composing verses named respectively " Mys- terious Nothing," " An Elegy on the Death of Jere- miah Langhorne," "Providence," and " A Religions Allegory of Life and Futurity addressed to the Youth." The " Elegy of Langhorne" was written in grateful recollection of the kind services he had rendered the poet when pressed down by his various misfortunes. This generous patron was one of the leading public men of the province, being, after James Logan, chief justice. The poetry, though evincing a moderate degree of imagination, compares favorably with its contemporaries. It shows that his education had been far above the humble station he was occupying, and that his moral principles were good, even pious.

" Governor Denny, who had just come over to the province with assur- ing messages from the proprietaries.

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The muse here, as in greater and more advanced states of society, must pay her court to the great and the titled. There was not within it a laureate so named and entitled, besides perquisites, to pecuniary rewards and a butt of sack. But with the advent of a medium for their expression must come odes salutatory and panegyrics of divers sorts for those who held the reins of power. This sort of poetry was one of the first to follow in the train of The American Weekly Mercury, and divides its favors with that and its suc- cessor, The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette. The first of the poets in this line in Philadelphia was one John Dommet, who for several years did that business alternately for both papers, winding up his career in 1729, not long before the publisher of the gazette with the name of lengthened sound was forced to retire and leave it in stronger hands. From all we can gather this poet received but little, if any, of the rewards he may have hoped and believed due to the verses in which he rendered immortal so many functionaries of high degree. Yet John Dommet, if he could not make himself rich by exalting yet higher the " blest" condition of the mighty upon earth, knew how to make himself "glorious" in the way such as he, Tam O'Shanter, and their likes love best ; and this he was wont to do full often out of the pence his landatory rhymes brought to him. He died at White Marsh. Some time afterward an elegy appeared in The Mer- cury in his honor. As a postscript to it the following summing up of his life was appended :

" Wealthy whilst rum he had was John, yet poor 'Cause worth but little; rich, 'cause craves lor no more ; Him England hirth, Heaven wit, this province gave Food, Indies drink, rhymes peace, White Marsh a grave."

In studying the early literature of Philadelphia thus far, erude and impoverished as it generally bas appeared, yet a native of that city may well feel a sense of pride in the comparison it bears with that of any other of the American cities. By many years, comparatively, as we have seen, was Philadelphia anterior both to Boston and New York in the institu- tion of a newspaper,-that first medium for the ex- pression of the ideas of literary men. In such a society literature must be later than any other matter for the employment of active, persistent, serious en- deavor. In such a society literature must in vain look for substantial encouragement from men who are intent upon organizing government, courts, com- merce, and other institutions necessary for material security and prosperity. In our chapter on the Bench and Bar are noticed the materials out of which the judiciary was constructed, how rude and uncultured, yet how naturally prone to retention of the dignity and some of the oppressiveness that had obtained in English courts time out of mind ; and how, yet, they retained the prejudices of those of their degree in the old country against the bar, who, though without their authority, were equally necessary for the adjudication

of litigious causes on just and reasonable terms. These merchant judges, who alternated hetween the bench and their counting-rooms and warehouses, could see no value in work other than that which gave palpable evidences of results, that they could see and handle and pass from one to another in the habitudes of business transactions. The ideas of such men at such times, that a man who does not work with his hands is either no worker at all or produces work of incomparably less value than that of one who docs, always operate discouragingly upon whatever is done in the office of the student. Such ideas never entirely subside, however advanced may be the state of so- ciety, and unreading men everywhere yet feel surprise, and some of them resentment, when they hear of the large pecuniary profits that occasionally accrue to a man of letters from an effort of his pen that has been uncommonly well received by the public. Yet it is during the formative period of a community's exist- ence that these ideas obtain so generally as often to amount to actual prohibition to literary development. Few enough in such a period are those who value even rudimentary instruction enough to care to have it imparted to their children except in very small quantities, and for a price that only school-masters who are abjeetly poor and utterly unfit for any other calling can be expected to accept, and then afterward avoid starvation. For education beyond rudimentary there was little concern beyond exceptional cases, or at least concern sufficient to withdraw from pursuits considered more important. Lawyers must arise, because, without its being so believed, they were as important to society as merchants and farmers and artisans, and indispensable to the maintenance of a pure judiciary, without which no society can subsist with freedom.

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History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884, Part 61

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898. cn; Westcott, Thompson, 1820-1888, joint author Publication date: 1884 Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : L. H. Everts & Co. Number of Pages: 992

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898. cn; Westcott, Thompson, 1820-1888, joint author
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : L. H. Everts & Co.
Number of Pages: 992