Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/177

Rh Jonson himself, and is indeed written in that great elegist's dignified, direct, and manly style:

In a word Marss and Minerva, both in him Concurd For arts, for arms, whose pen and sword alike As Catos did, may admireation strike In to his foes; while they confess with all It was their guilt stil'd him a Criminall.

Maryland has even less to show than Virginia. The rhyming tags of verse appended to the chapters of George Alsop's Character of the Province of Maryland (1666) cannot be taken seriously. The description of Maryland contained in the Carmen Seculare of a certain Mr. Lewis shows that Pope had not yet reached Baltimore in 1732, however at home he may have been in Boston and Philadelphia. Of the same type is a True Relation of the Flourishing State of Pennsylvania (1686), by John Holme, a resident of that colony. The True Relation is utilitarian in purpose and homely in style, but on the whole its five hundred lines in various metres, with their catalogues of native animals and plants in the manner of William Wood's verses in his New England's Prospect, are rather pleasing. New York produced practically no English verse until the Revolution; and the Carolinas and Georgia continued barren until near the close of the eighteenth century, when Charleston became something of a literary centre. But Pennsylvania came to be fairly prolific early in the transition period, and continued so for almost a century until New York and Boston, as literary centres, finally displaced Philadelphia.

The earliest New England verse was as utilitarian and matter-of-fact as any prose. Narratives of the voyages, annals of the colonies, descriptions of flora, fauna, and scenery, written in the main for readers in the mother country, were versified merely for the sake of the jingle. Altogether this descriptive and historical verse amounts to less than a thousand lines. A Looking Glass for the Times (1677), by Peter Folger of Nantucket, derives interest from the fact that it was written by the maternal grandfather of Benjamin Franklin. Its four hundred lines in ballad quatrains are very bad verse, however, and, though it has been termed "A manly plea for toleration in an