Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/185

Rh. Jane Turell (1708-1735), whose literary tastes were formed by her father, admired the "Matchless Orinda," Blackmore, and Waller; but she wrote the couplet of Pope. Another and even earlier evidence of the influence of Pope is a poem by Francis Knapp, who was born in England in 1672, and at an uncertain date emigrated to America and settled as a country gentleman near Boston. In 1715 he addressed a poetical epistle to Pope beginning

Hail! sacred bard! a muse unknown before Salutes thee from the bleak Atlantic shore,

which was included among the prefatory poems in a subsequent edition of Windsor Forest (first published in 1713). Thus promptly Pope crossed the Atlantic to begin his undisputed reign of almost a century. Knapp's heroic poem Gloria Brittannorum (1723), an obvious imitation of Addison's Campaign, celebrates "The most illustrious persons in camp and cabinet since the glorious revolution to the recent time," and is perhaps the earliest example of the patriotic narrative poem that was to become so common in American after the Revolution.

But a far more distinguished exponent of the style of Pope was the Rev. Mather Byles. "To let you see a little of the reputation which you bear in these unknown climates—I transmit to you the enclosed poems," Byles wrote to Pope in 1727. It was perhaps these poems that Byles published in a volume in 1736, and which were published anonymously in the somewhat celebrated volume of 1744, Poems by Several Hands. Mather Byles is a more eminent figure in the annals of American poetry than is at all warranted by his poems, which are few and altogether imitative. His reputation is due in part to the general poverty of the transition period—the barest era in our verse—and in part to his fame as a preacher and a wit. He was born in 1707, was educated at Harvard, and served as pastor of the Hollis Street church in Boston through the greater part of his ministerial life. After the Declaration, he became a staunch and vehement Tory, lost his former popularity, and died embittered and broken in 1788. He corresponded with Lansdowne, Pope, and Watts, took himself seriously as a poet,