Sunday, February 25, 2024

James Thomson Danced the Mind Dance of his Day.

Peter Gay makes an off-hand observation, in his classic study of The Enlightenment, so quietly stunning that even a dedicated traveler in the 18th century might be left staring blankly at the page. I know I was.

James Thomson's Seasons, a comprehensive celebration of the metaphysical and aesthetic virtues of the new science, is only the best known of a host of poetic tributes to natural philosophy.1

I've had my old Aldine Edition on the shelf now for decades. Ever since I was in my teens or early 20s, and on rare occasion, since my first reading, I've leafed its pages wondering whether the passage of years might bring it more alive.

In the meanwhile, I have often been shocked by just how aware Joseph Addison was of the science of the early 18th century. At times he even intuits facts that had then yet to be formally discovered. I am also aware of Alexander Pope's famous lines celebrating England's most popular scientist, Isaac Newton, but somehow, it turns out, had read right over Thompson's.

Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds

Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;

And to the sage-instructed eye unfold

The various twine of light, by thee disclosed

From the white mingling maze. Not so the swain:

He, wondering, views the bright enchantment bend,

Delightful, o'er the radiant fields, and runs

To catch the falling glory; but, amazed,

Beholds the amusive arch before him fly;

Then vanish quite away.2

But I was less observant still. I had read Thomson's Seasons as an unusually capable transitional work away from rhymed couplets of the previous Alexandrian Age — in this case to unrhymed iambic pentameter, a.k.a. blank verse — a bit too intellectual for its subject.

The real point, however, is that science is everywhere in The Seasons and a good deal more. Thomson proves to have resoundingly been an early adherent of the Mind Dance — of employing contemporary images from science in formal poetry, of putting new wine in old wine-skins as it were. Uniquely so for the time. The famous poem of pudgy little James Thomson had been appreciated by Voltaire.3

Like every young reader, I was impatient. Now, at long last, I was ready to actually read the poetry of James Thomson.

Not only that but the science in his poetry has suffered the fate of all science, becoming outdated. It is an inevitable kind of naivete in this line of poetry, inevitably part of how and what it says, part of the charm. I've already had to accept that changes in the cosmos within which I wrote my own work have begun to co-write my poetry after a mere 10 or 20 years.

With what an awful world-revolving power

Were first the unwieldy planets launched along

The illimitable void! thus to remain,

Amid the flux of many thousand years,

That oft has swept the toiling race of men

And all their laboured monuments away,

Firm, unremitting, matchless, in their course;4

Imagine if Thomson had known that the universe has existed for at least 11 billion years. The solar system some 4.5 billion years. Not remotely the “many thousand years” that so impressed the science of his times with their magnitude.

Still, the stronger images remain intact, stunning even. Circa 1726, the poet understood that the limitations of our senses were a blessing.

These, concealed

By the kind art of forming Heaven, escape

The grosser eye of man: for, if the worlds

In worlds inclosed should on his senses burst,

From cates ambrosial, and the nectared bowl,

He would abhorrent turn; and in dead night,

When Silence sleeps o'er all, be stunned with noise.5

Our perception is proportioned to fit the limits of our brain's ability to process. If we saw every particle in our field of vision our sight would be nothing but chaos. If we heard every sound, no matter how small, we would be overwhelmed, at a loss how to make sense of it, deaf.

Wanting to paint realistic poetic scenes, Thomson seems to have anticipated the field of cultural anthropology. Scattered liberally throughout his poem are scenes that he has clearly converted from prose travelogues and medical accounts.

A boisterous race, by frosty Caurus pierced,

Who little pleasure know and fear no pain,

Prolific swarm. They once relumed the flame

Of lost mankind in polished slavery sunk;

Drove martial horde on horde, with dreadful sweep,

Resistless, rushing o'er the enfeebled south,

And gave the vanquished world another form.

Not such the sons of Lapland: wisely they

Despise the insensate barbarous trade of war;

They ask no more than simple Nature gives ;

They love their mountains, and enjoy their storms,

No false desires, no pride-created wants,

Disturb the peaceful current of their time;

And, through the restless ever-tortured maze

Of pleasure, or ambition, bid it rage.

Their reindeer form their riches. These their tents,

Their robes, their beds, and all their homely wealth

Supply, their wholesome fare, and cheerful cups.

Obsequious at their call, the docile tribe

Yield to the sled their necks, and whirl them swift

O'er hill and dale, heaped into one expanse

Of marbled snow, or far as eye can sweep

With a blue crust of ice unbounded glazed.

By dancing meteors then, that ceaseless shake

A waving blaze refracted o'er the heavens,

And vivid moons, and stars that keener play

With double lustre from the radiant waste,

Even in the depth of polar night, they find

A wondrous day enough to light the chase,

Or guide their daring steps to Finland fairs.6

This manner of scene-painting was genuinely new in his day. Though it might seem foreign now — some 300 years later — it was only a different kind of foreign then. A unique experience was available then to those who could receive it and is preserved for us now — expanded, actually.




1   Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment. The Science of Freedom. 127.

2  The Poetical Works of James Thomson, Vol. 1 (No date. 1860). 10.

3  Ibid. cxxviii. Voltaire to Mr. Lyttelton, May 17, 1790. “You was beneficent to Mr. Thomson, when he lived, and you is so to me in favouring me with his works. I was acquainted with the author when I stayed in England. I discovered in him a great genius, and a great simplicity,”

4  Summer, I.44.

5  Summer, I.52

6  Winter, I.176.



Also from the Library of Babel:

  • The American Garden.  January 16, 2019.  “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
  • Blank Verse Now and Then.  January 1, 2019.  “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.” 
  • The Elegy and the Internet.  July 1, 2005.  ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
  • Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.


Also from Virtual Grub Street:

  • Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

  • A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’



Sunday, August 06, 2023

I offer you first fruits from my ancestral fields...

Elegies: with Parallel Latin Texts by Tibullus

Translated by A. M. Juster.
Oxford University Press. 2012. 176 pp.
ISBN 978-0199603312.

Rome of the mid and late 1st century BCE was an enormously powerful republic in flux. It had achieved an empire stretching from Great Britain to Egypt, from North Africa to the Black Sea, at the cost of a continuing struggle for internal and external cohesion. Uprisings in its own immediate countryside were quelled at the price of Latin citizenship for all resident and natural born Italians, a category which included a wide range of ethnic groups. The need to maintain huge tracts of conquered land required the naturalization of key citizens from the subject countries.

These demands resulted in massive changes to the Roman culture, not altogether different from the changes to our own over the past 60 years. Foreign citizens brought foreign customs. The Romans themselves were deeply divided over whether to incorporate these customs into their lives. The young, in particular, often found the new eastern influence irresistibly attractive.

The changes were so complex and confusing that the citizens sought their familiar lives back by accepting a dictatorship under the most Roman of Romans Julius Caesar. The opposition understood that the one most important aspect of traditional Roman life, however, would be destroyed as the result: Rome would no longer be a republic. Caesar was famously assassinated and a great civil war ensued while the frontiers still needed to be defended and their goods brought to market. Huge ethnically mixed armies were required in order to accomplish all of this. The confusion only increased.

Among the vastly many changes all of this provoked, the heads of Rome's patrician families, and their sons and retainers, were constantly away from home conducting war and trade. They left behind them their wives to manage their estates. Those wives and their daughters were freed, as a result, to enjoy a kind of de facto women's liberation. The youngest often followed the new "cool" customs, worshipping Osiris and Isis instead of the Roman gods, donning rich robes and jewelry, and seizing the opportunity of their freedom to take lovers.

At this time, patrician husbands began to experience an unprecedented difficulty begetting heirs. Many wives had become adept at a wide range of methods of contraception and abortion in order to enjoy their lovers without detection. They preferred lovers, and the gifts and delicious intrigue that came with them, to being mothers.


Among the most desired lovers were the sons of wealthy families who had been left behind as too young or otherwise unfitted for war. As young men they had certainly been sent to school in Rome, and, almost as certainly, to finishing school in Athens or Alexandria, where many primarily studied Greek poetry. In short, they were highly polished and sometimes even possessed of access to considerable wealth.

Over the space of some dozen years, Julius Caesar's favorite nephew Octavius—who later would be known as Augustus Caesar—would craftily win the succession of civil wars that followed his assassination. It seems that young Albius Tibullus's family had initially sided with the faction around the assassins, and, perhaps as the result, the majority of their estates had been lost during the poet's youth. In order to get into Octavius's good graces, he followed his family's patron, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, on a victorious military campaign into Aquitaine, on behalf of the new Caesar, where he shared Messala's table and appears to have received commendations for valor.

For all the confusion and conflict, Rome grew vastly wealthier, over the same period, with war booty and colonial trade. In the words of A. M. Juster's particularly adept translation of Tibullus's Elegies:

Our iron age approves not love but, loot of war—
though loot has played a role in many evils...

A looter longs to occupy the boundless plains
so many acres feed his countless sheep.
He longs for foreign marble, and his column's hauled
through city street-life by uncounted oxen.

Traditional Roman virtue was rapidly disappearing. The traditional noble ideal was being replaced by the avarice of "mere" freemen. A nouveau riche was displacing the culture in which Tibullus had grown up.

However Tibullus came to be decorated for his service in Aquitaine, his Elegies make it clear that the campaign left him with one overwhelming desire:

I offer you first fruits from my ancestral fields,
from a full sty, a pig, a farmer's gift.
I'll follow in clean clothes and bear the basket bound
with myrtle leaves with myrtle on my head.
I'll please you all this way; let someone else well armed
and helped by Mars lay hostile leaders low
so as a soldier he can tell me deeds while drinking
and paint the camp with wine upon the table!

War was dirty, uncomfortable and dangerous. Upon his return he had become Delia's lover and only wanted to marry her and leave the run of the estate to her. Pleading fragile health, he managed to live out the rest of his days between his farm and visits to the poetry circles of Rome.

To support his aversion to business and war, Tibullus often cites a mythical prehistoric Rome much like modern American hippies romanticized pre-Columbian, native American lifestyles. In the olden days, when men lived on acorns, according to Tibullus's amusing mythology, there were no wars, no long dusty trips to be taken, and love was simple and unencumbered by coyness or exchange for expensive gifts.

Among the conservative factions to which almost all patrician families and their clients belonged, such sentiments were offensive. Among the liberal factions to which almost all poets and their patrons belonged, they were provocative, delightfully decadent. Tibullus was a pretty boy and he didn't care who knew it. He had his estate, his friends and his lovers and no worse complaint than a reduced fortune.

I do not miss my fathers' wealth or profits built
from yields that my old grandfather had saved.
A small crop is enough; it is enough to rest
in bed and loll upon familiar sheets.
How sweet it is while lying down to hear fierce winds
and hold a mistress with a tender grasp.

As for his friends, they had his sensual, beautifully fluent poetry, descended from the Greek of Callimachus and the Greek Anthology—probably gained by the finest liberal education a Roman could afford—and the gentle melancholy of his person, and that was enough.


The "familiar sheets," from the swatch of Juster's translation above, are something of an anachronism meant to invoke a comparable feeling in the modern reader's mind. He uses such tropes sparingly and with excellent judgment throughout. Elsewhere, in Juster, Tibullus imagines a "For Sale" sign in front of his house such as did not exist at the time. In the original Latin the sign is an auction notice. He imagines his lover picking a door lock with a hairpin while such locks at the time were much too large to pick. In the case of the "familiar sheets," they are part anachronism, part best guess. In the original, Tibullus is referring either to pillows or mattress ticking. Juster chooses ticking and lightens it up to give the modern reader a recognizable contemporary equivalent for the poet's sense of simple luxury. Bed sheets, as we presently know them, did not yet exist in the western world.

The allure of running a small estate, and being the subject of poems already highly appreciated by Rome's finest poets, was not enough for Delia, in the end. In time, she married another, probably wealthier, more ambitious man, who seems to have spent considerable time on the road. Tibullus briefly remained her secret lover and poet as opportunity presented itself.

For all that Tibullus's noble heritage and reduced circumstances had left him decrying the new wealth and the changes it was bringing, his love of young friends and lovers left him with a foot in both camps. While his older contemporary, the poet Virgil, sternly wrote country poems filled with details of crop rotation and manuring fallow fields and strictly Roman gods, Tibullus's Elegies are delightfully interwoven with allusions to Isis and Osiris (interlopers from the east) and flower-strewn local festivals. He cherished the Lares of his family home—much humbler spirits that protected the hearth—more than the huge gods that traveled the universe beyond. He found the slaves and servants on his estate, and his country neighbors, and their rustic celebrations, delightfully picturesque—much to be preferred to Mars, the god of war.

Poetry was not all Tibullus brought back from Greece. Even sturdy, supremely Roman Virgil was unable to resist an elegy reviving the Greek tradition of boy-love. In Virgil's case, the elegy is a dialogue between two purportedly fictional characters. Tibullus, on the other hand, was all about satisfying his own desire, a fact that suggests his elegies about his pursuit of the boy Marathus where genuinely personal. When the boy cheats on him, he is clear about what has been sullied between them:

And yet my lad has slept with him! I might believe
that he could couple with an untamed beast!
How dare you sell my fondling to other men?
Weren't you insane to offer them my kisses?

The Romans of that time, while not as disgusted as modern British and Americans, rejected boy-love as a vice (the "Greek vice," as the poet Horace called it). The new young sophisticated noble, on the other hand, found it daring to write about, even tempting to engage in.

Here, as in most of Juster's translation, the rendering is not only fine as poetry but literal. The poetic unit is the unrhymed couplet throughout. More than occasionally (as is the case in the first two lines above), the first line features one more iambic foot than the second, approximating the original elegiac couplet, utilized by Tibullus, which consisted of a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic pentameter. Juster allows his iambics to grow quite loose from time to time in order to get the same effects of concision or of a gentle falling-off in the second line, and even an occasional sense of the longer, quantitative (long-and-short, versus our English stressed-and-unstressed) Roman poetic foot. The frequency and selection of enjambment and run-on lines even approximates the original text.


His affair with Delia having ended, Tibullus, as might be expected, will seek out a more sophisticated dalliance. He will refer to her as "dominam" (mistress, domineer-ess) and stress her imperiousness, a trope that will dominate love poetry for centuries to come. For the sake of the elegies he will write for her, he will name her "Nemesis" (the Greek Goddess of humiliation). She is his irresistible torturer.

I swore so often not to go back to her door,
yet when I swore, my willful feet returned.
Cruel love, if only it were possible I'd see
your darts and arrows smashed and torches snuffed.

For these very reasons, she is his muse. He cannot write a lick of poetry without the luscious pain she brings him.

But, for all the second book of the Elegies belongs to Nemesis, she is less present than was Delia. Other subjects require her poet's attention: friends, festivals, his patron's son. And then there is the silence of an early grave. He died, in 19 BCE, in his mid-30s. According to the poet Ovid, his mother was with him when he died which probably means that he died on his farm. In Ovid's elegy, Delia and Nemesis were in attendance at his funeral pyre.

It is clear that an enormous amount of effort has gone into making A. M. Juster's translation seem as artfully simple as Tibullus's original Elegies. It is difficult to believe that they could possibly be better rendered into contemporary English.

This essay first appeared in the online journal Eclectica.



Also from the Library of Babel:

  • The American Garden.  January 16, 2019.  “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
  • Blank Verse Now and Then.  January 1, 2019.  “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.” 
  • The Elegy and the Internet.  July 1, 2005.  ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
  • Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.


Also from Virtual Grub Street:

  • Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

  • A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’









Monday, July 24, 2023

An open letter on “giving employment in your line of business to ebony workers”, Jan. 13, 1838.

It may not be clear to those who have not studied the history of America in its documents just what was the tenor of the treatment of legally free persons of color. Here is a single document but it is only exceptional for the fact that it is outright about the reaction of low and moderate skilled white laborers to the competition among non-white populations for their work. Free persons of color increased competition for work and prices had to be cut from previous levels in order to win bids. Accordingly, wages went down.

The following open letter explains itself. Popular prejudice against workers of color is being used to pressure the state and local governments to provide relief for a financial loss.

The text that follows is taken from the second voyage of the geologist Sir Charles Lyell to American. Where he was intent to observe not only the geological formations but more of the characteristics of the people. Its relationship to the “open letter” is obvious.


An open letter from a citizen printed in the Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), Jan. 13, 1838.

To the Contractors for Mason’s and Carpenter’s Work, Athens[, Georgia]:

Gentlemen: I desire your candid consideration of the views I shall here express. I ask no reply to them except at your own volition. I am aware that most of you have too strong antipathy to encourage the masonry and carpentry trades of your poor white brothers, that your predilections for giving employment in your line of business to ebony workers have either so cheapened the white man’s labor, or expatriated hence with but a few solitary exceptions, all the white masons and carpenters of this town.

The white man is the only real, legal, moral and civil proprietor of this country and state. The right of his proprietorship reaches from the date of the studies of those white men, Copernicus and Gallileo, who indicated from the seclusion of their closets the sphericity of the earth: which sphericity hinted to another white man, Columbus, the possibility by a westerly course of sailing, of finding land. Hence by white man alone was this continent discovered; by the prowess of white men alone (though not always properly or humanely exercised), were the fierce and active Indians driven occidentally : and if swarms and hordes of infuriated red men pour down now from the Northwest, like the wintry blast thereof, the white men alone, aye, those to whom you decline to give money for bread and clothes, for their famishing families, in the logic matter of withholding work from them, or employing negroes, in the sequel, to cheapen their wages to a rate that amounts to a moral and physical impossibility for them either to live here and support their families-would bare their breasts to the keen and whizzing shafts of the savage crusaders-defending negroes too in the bargain, for if left to themselves without our aid, the Indians would or can sweep the negroes hence, “as dew drops are shaken from the lion’s mane.”

The right, then, gentlemen, you will no doubt candidly admit, of the white man to employment in preference to negroes, who must defer to us since they live well enough on plantations, cannot be considered impeachable by contractors. It is a right more virtual and indisputable than that of agrarianism. As masters of the polls in a majority, carrying all before them, I am surprised the poor do not elect faithful members to the Legislature, who will make it penal to prefer negro mechanic labor to white men’s. But of the premises as I have now laid them down, you will candidly judge for yourselves, and draw a conclusion with me, that white bricklayers and house joiners must henceforward have ample work and remuneration; and yourselves and other contractors will set the example, and pursue it for the future without deviation.

Your respectfully

J. J. Flournoy1



And, now, from Charles Lyell:


I was startled by the publication of an act passed by the Legislature of Georgia during my visit to that state, December 27th, 1845. The following is the preamble and one of the clauses:

An act to prohibit colored mechanics and masons, being slaves, or free persons of color, being mechanics or masons, from making contracts for the erection of buildings, or for the repair of buildings, and declaring the white person or persons directly or indirectly contracting with or employing them, as well as the master, employer, manager, or agent for said slave, or guardian

for said free person of color, authorizing or permitting the same, guilty of a misdemeanor,” and prescribing punishment for the violation of this act.

SECTION i. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Georgia in General Assembly met, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same, That from and after the 1st day of February next, each and every white person who shall hereafter contract or bargain with any slave, mechanic, or mason, or free person of color, being a mechanic or mason, shall be liable to be indicted for a misdemeanor; and, on conviction, to be fined, at the discretion of the Court, not exceeding two hundred dollars.”

Then follows another clause imposing the like penalties on the owners of slaves, or guardians of free persons of color, who authorize the contracts prohibited by this statute.

I may first observe, in regard to this disgraceful law, which was only carried by a small majority in the Georgian Legislature, that it proves that not a few of the negro race have got on so well in the world in reputation and fortune, and in skill in certain arts, that it was worth while to legislate against them in order to keep them down, and prevent them from entering into successful rivalry with the whites.2



1   Phillips, Ulrich B. Plantation and Frontier Documents (1909). II.360-1.

2   Lyell, Charles. A Second Visit to the United States (New York, 1850), vol. II.97-9.

Also from the Library of Babel:

  • Pierce Butler, Fanny Kemble, et al.  July 22, 2020.  ‘“An attempt of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to make a way around the original Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, by finding a private agent guilty of kidnapping for having remanded a slave from Pennsylvania to Maryland was forcefully overturned by the U. S. Supreme Court in Prigg v. United States (1842).”’

  • The Best Translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia.  July, 14, 2019.  “For the next month, then, I put aside a few hours each night.  Not only with Singleton and Merwin.  In the glorious Age of the Internet, the first step could only be a search for what books relating to the subject were available on Google Book Search and the Internet Archive.”

  • A Memoriam for W. S. Merwin.  April 17, 2019.  “It took about three days, as I recall, for me to surrender to the fact that W. S. Merwin was the finest English language poet of his time.  I wished I’d been prepared to read him years ago.”

  • Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

Also from Virtual Grub Street:

  • Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

  • A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’


Sunday, June 25, 2023

An open letter on “giving employment in your line of business to ebony workers”, Jan. 13, 1838.

It may not be clear to those who have not studied the history of America in its documents just what was the tenor of the treatment of legally free persons of color. Here is a single document but it is only exceptional for the fact that it is outright about the reaction of low and moderate skilled white laborers to the competition among non-white populations for their work. Free persons of color increased competition for work and prices had to be cut from previous levels in order to win bids. Accordingly, wages went down.

The following open letter explains itself. Popular prejudice against workers of color is being used to pressure the state and local governments to provide relief for a financial loss.

The text that follows is taken from the second voyage of the geologist Sir Charles Lyell to American. Where he was intent to observe not only the geological formations but more of the characteristics of the people. Its relationship to the “open letter” is obvious.


An open letter from a citizen printed in the Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), Jan. 13, 1838.

To the Contractors for Mason’s and Carpenter’s Work, Athens[, Georgia]:

Gentlemen: I desire your candid consideration of the views I shall here express. I ask no reply to them except at your own volition. I am aware that most of you have too strong antipathy to encourage the masonry and carpentry trades of your poor white brothers, that your predilections for giving employment in your line of business to ebony workers have either so cheapened the white man’s labor, or expatriated hence with but a few solitary exceptions, all the white masons and carpenters of this town.

The white man is the only real, legal, moral and civil proprietor of this country and state. The right of his proprietorship reaches from the date of the studies of those white men, Copernicus and Gallileo, who indicated from the seclusion of their closets the sphericity of the earth: which sphericity hinted to another white man, Columbus, the possibility by a westerly course of sailing, of finding land. Hence by white man alone was this continent discovered; by the prowess of white men alone (though not always properly or humanely exercised), were the fierce and active Indians driven occidentally : and if swarms and hordes of infuriated red men pour down now from the Northwest, like the wintry blast thereof, the white men alone, aye, those to whom you decline to give money for bread and clothes, for their famishing families, in the logic matter of withholding work from them, or employing negroes, in the sequel, to cheapen their wages to a rate that amounts to a moral and physical impossibility for them either to live here and support their families-would bare their breasts to the keen and whizzing shafts of the savage crusaders-defending negroes too in the bargain, for if left to themselves without our aid, the Indians would or can sweep the negroes hence, “as dew drops are shaken from the lion’s mane.”

The right, then, gentlemen, you will no doubt candidly admit, of the white man to employment in preference to negroes, who must defer to us since they live well enough on plantations, cannot be considered impeachable by contractors. It is a right more virtual and indisputable than that of agrarianism. As masters of the polls in a majority, carrying all before them, I am surprised the poor do not elect faithful members to the Legislature, who will make it penal to prefer negro mechanic labor to white men’s. But of the premises as I have now laid them down, you will candidly judge for yourselves, and draw a conclusion with me, that white bricklayers and house joiners must henceforward have ample work and remuneration; and yourselves and other contractors will set the example, and pursue it for the future without deviation.

Your respectfully

J. J. Flournoy1



And, now, from Charles Lyell:


I was startled by the publication of an act passed by the Legislature of Georgia during my visit to that state, December 27th, 1845. The following is the preamble and one of the clauses:

An act to prohibit colored mechanics and masons, being slaves, or free persons of color, being mechanics or masons, from making contracts for the erection of buildings, or for the repair of buildings, and declaring the white person or persons directly or indirectly contracting with or employing them, as well as the master, employer, manager, or agent for said slave, or guardian

for said free person of color, authorizing or permitting the same, guilty of a misdemeanor,” and prescribing punishment for the violation of this act.

SECTION i. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Georgia in General Assembly met, and it is hereby enacted by the authority of the same, That from and after the 1st day of February next, each and every white person who shall hereafter contract or bargain with any slave, mechanic, or mason, or free person of color, being a mechanic or mason, shall be liable to be indicted for a misdemeanor; and, on conviction, to be fined, at the discretion of the Court, not exceeding two hundred dollars.”

Then follows another clause imposing the like penalties on the owners of slaves, or guardians of free persons of color, who authorize the contracts prohibited by this statute.

I may first observe, in regard to this disgraceful law, which was only carried by a small majority in the Georgian Legislature, that it proves that not a few of the negro race have got on so well in the world in reputation and fortune, and in skill in certain arts, that it was worth while to legislate against them in order to keep them down, and prevent them from entering into successful rivalry with the whites.2



1   Phillips, Ulrich B. Plantation and Frontier Documents (1909). II.360-1.

2   Lyell, Charles. A Second Visit to the United States (New York, 1850), vol. II.97-9.

Also from the Library of Babel:

  • Pierce Butler, Fanny Kemble, et al.  July 22, 2020.  ‘“An attempt of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to make a way around the original Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, by finding a private agent guilty of kidnapping for having remanded a slave from Pennsylvania to Maryland was forcefully overturned by the U. S. Supreme Court in Prigg v. United States (1842).”’

  • The Best Translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia.  July, 14, 2019.  “For the next month, then, I put aside a few hours each night.  Not only with Singleton and Merwin.  In the glorious Age of the Internet, the first step could only be a search for what books relating to the subject were available on Google Book Search and the Internet Archive.”

  • A Memoriam for W. S. Merwin.  April 17, 2019.  “It took about three days, as I recall, for me to surrender to the fact that W. S. Merwin was the finest English language poet of his time.  I wished I’d been prepared to read him years ago.”

  • Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

Also from Virtual Grub Street:

  • Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

  • A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’


Friday, June 16, 2023

No. 185.] Tuesday, October 2, 1711. On Zealotry.

Once again Joseph Addison speaks to another phenomenon in his world with descriptions and terms that fit our own almost equally well. The subject is the destructive nature of zeal gone wrong and the many ways in which it can go wrong. Except for the quote from Ovid, the perspective would today (300 years later) be called, “Liberal Christian”. This is in no small measure because of the likes of Addison.


THERE is nothing in which men more deceive themselves than in what the world calls zeal. There are so many passions which hide themselves under it, and so many mischiefs arising from it, that some

have gone so far as to say it would have been for the benefit of mankind if it had never been reckoned in the catalogue of virtues. It is certain, where it is once laudable and prudential, it is an hundred times criminal and erroneous; nor can it be otherwise, if we consider that it operates with equal violence in all religions, how ever opposite they may be to one another, and in all the subdivisions of each religion in particular.

We are told by some of the Jewish rabbins, that the first murder was occasioned by a religious controversy; and if we had the whole history of zeal from the days of Cain to our own times, we should see it filled with so many scenes of slaughter and bloodshed, as would make a wise man very careful, how he suffers himself to be actuated by such a principle, when it only regards matters of opinion and speculation.

I would have every zealous man examine his heart thoroughly, and, I believe, he will often find, that what he calls a zeal for his religion, is either pride, interest, or ill nature. A man, who differs from another in opinion, sets himself above him in his own judgment, and in several particulars pretends to be the wiser person.

This is a great provocation to the proud man, and gives a very keen edge to what he calls his zeal. And that this is the case very often, we may observe from the behaviour of some of the most zealous for orthodoxy, who have often great friendships and intimacies with vicious immoral men, provided they do but agree with them in the same scheme of belief. The reason is, because the vicious believer gives the precedency to the virtuous man, and allows the good Christian to be the worthier person, at the same time that he cannot come up to his perfections. This we find exemplified in that trite passage which we see quoted in almost every system of ethics, though upon another occasion:

Video meliora proboque,

Deteriora sequor— Ovid Met. Vii. 20.

I see the right, and I approve it too;

Condemn the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue.

On the contrary, it is certain, if our zeal were true and genuine, we should be much more angry with a sinner than a heretic; since there are several cases which may excuse the latter before his great Judge, but none which can excuse the former.

Interest is likewise a great inflamer, and sets a man on persecution under the colour of zeal. For this reason we find none are so forward to promote the true worship by fire and sword, as those who find their present account in it. But I shall extend the word interest to a larger meaning than what is generally given it, as it relates to our spiritual safety and welfare, as well as to our temporal. A man is glad to gain numbers on his side, as they serve to strengthen him in his private opinions. Every proselyte is like a new argument for the establishment of his faith. It makes him believe that his principles carry conviction with them, and are the more likely to be true when he finds they are conformable to the reason of others, as well as to his own. And that this temper of mind deludes a man very often into an opinion of his zeal, may appear from the common behaviour of the atheist, who maintains and spreads his opinions with as much heat as those who believe they do it only out of a passion for God’s glory.

Ill-nature is another dreadful imitator of zeal. Many a good man may have a natural rancour and malice in his heart, which has been in some measure quelled and subdued by religion; but if it finds any pretence of breaking out, which does not seem to him inconsistent with the duties of a Christian, it throws off all restraint, and rages in its full fury. Zeal is, therefore, a great ease to a malicious man, by making him believe he does God service, whilst he is gratifying the bent of a perverse revengeful temper. For this reason we find that most have been in the world, have taken their rise from a furious pretended zeal.

I love to see a man zealous in a good matter, and especially when his zeal shows itself for advancing morality, and promoting the happiness of mankind. But when I find the instruments he works with are racks and gibbets, galleys and dungeons: when he imprisons men's persons, confiscates their estates, ruins their families, and burns the body to save the soul, I cannot stick to pronounce of such a one, that (whatever he may think of his faith and religion) his faith is vain, and his religion unprofitable.

After having treated of these false zealots in religion, I cannot forbear mentioning a monstrous species of men, who one would not think had any existence in nature, were they not to be met with in ordinary conversation, I mean the zealots in atheism. One would fancy that these men, though they fall short, in every other respect, of those who make a profession of religion, would at least outshine them in this particular, and be exempt from that single fault which seems to grow out of the imprudent fervours of religion. But so it is, that infidelity is propagated with as much fierceness and contention, wrath and indignation, as if the safety of mankind depended upon it. There is something so ridiculous and perverse in this kind of zealots, that one does not know how to set them out in their proper colours.

They are a sort of gamesters who are eternally upon the fret, though they play for nothing. They are perpetually teazing their friends to come over to them, though at the same time they allow that neither of them shall get any thing by the bargain. In short, the zeal of spreading atheism is, if possible, more absurd than atheism itself.

Since I have mentioned this unaccountable zeal which appears in atheists, and infidels, I must farther observe, that they are likewise in a most particular manner possessed with the spirit of bigotry. They are wedded to opinions full of contradictions and impossibility, and at the same time look upon the smallest difficulty in an article of faith as a sufficient reason for rejecting it. Notions that fall in with the common reason of mankind, that are conformable to the sense of all ages, and all nations, not to mention their tendency for promoting the happiness of societies, or of particular persons, are exploded as errors and prejudices; and schemes erected in their stead that are altogether monstrous and irrational, and require the most extravagant credulity to embrace them. I would fain ask one of these bigoted infidels, supposing all the great points of atheism, as the casual or eternal formation of the world, the materiality of a thinking substance, the mortality of the soul, the fortuitous organization of the body, the motions and gravitation of matter, with the like particulars, were laid together and formed into a kind of creed, according to the opinions of the most celebrated atheists; I say, supposing such a creed as this were form ed and imposed upon any one people in the world, whether it would not require an infinitely, greater measure of faith, than any set of articles which they so violently oppose. Let me therefore advise this generation of wranglers, for their own and for the public good, to act at least so consistently with themselves, as not to burn with zeal for irreligion, and with bigotry for nonsense.


Also from the Library of Babel:

  • Pierce Butler, Fanny Kemble, et al.  July 22, 2020.  ‘“An attempt of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to make a way around the original Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, by finding a private agent guilty of kidnapping for having remanded a slave from Pennsylvania to Maryland was forcefully overturned by the U. S. Supreme Court in Prigg v. United States (1842).”’

  • The Best Translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia.  July, 14, 2019.  “For the next month, then, I put aside a few hours each night.  Not only with Singleton and Merwin.  In the glorious Age of the Internet, the first step could only be a search for what books relating to the subject were available on Google Book Search and the Internet Archive.”

  • A Memoriam for W. S. Merwin.  April 17, 2019.  “It took about three days, as I recall, for me to surrender to the fact that W. S. Merwin was the finest English language poet of his time.  I wished I’d been prepared to read him years ago.”

  • Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.

Also from Virtual Grub Street:

  • Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

  • A Thousand Years of English Terms.  June 2, 2019.  ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”.    There was no clock to be o’.  But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’