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This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. It was produced from digital images created through the libraries’ mass digitization efforts. The digital images were cleaned and prepared for printing through automated processes. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that were part of the original work itself, or introduced during digitization. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library at www.hathitrust.org.
The progress of dulness, or The rare adventures of Tom Brainless. By the celebrated author of Mc.Fingal.
(The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration a...)
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.
Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses.
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Library of Congress
W032380
In verse. Attributed to John Trumbull in the Dictionary of American biography.
Printed at Carlisle Pa. : for Archibald Loudon, bookseller, by George Kline, 1797. iv,1,6-72p. ; 12°
M'fingal: A Modern Epic Poem, in Four Cantos (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from M'fingal: A Modern Epic Poem, in Four Cantos...)
Excerpt from M'fingal: A Modern Epic Poem, in Four Cantos
The scene of the P'oem is laid in Massachusetts, where the Revolution originated. The time is in 1775.
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John Trumbull was born on April 24, 1750 at Westbury (now a part of Watertown), Connecticut.
His father, John, a Congregational minister and a fellow of Yale College, was known as a man of sound judgment in practical affairs; he was a first cousin of Jonathan Trumbull, 1710-1785, Revolutionary governor of Connecticut. The poet's mother was Sarah (Whitman), a granddaughter of Solomon Stoddard.
Education
His mother instructed and encouraged the boy while he made an almost incredible but well authenticated record of precocity, which culminated in a successful examination for entrance into Yale College at the age of seven.
Being over-young for college life, Trumbull was honorably rusticated to Westbury until he was thirteen.
He matriculated at Yale in 1763. Although a faithful student, he disapproved of the Yale curriculum because of its concentration on "solid learning, " i. e. , theology, mathematics, and linguistics, to the neglect of English composition and the interpretation of literature. Accordingly, with the cooperation of friends, including Timothy Dwight and David Humphreys, he satirized the course of study and attempted by example to create among the students a love of belles-lettres. The poetry which he wrote as a student was chiefly of two kinds: "correct" but undistinguished elegies written under the aegis of the neo-classical school, and brilliant, if fragmentary, comic verses with an occasional admixture of mild bawdry. From the former type he hoped ultimately for fame; the latter, which exhibited his true talents, he circulated privately among friends. His burlesque "Epithalamium, " written in 1769, artfully combined wit and scholarship. In prose he produced a series of polished Addisonian essays, which were published in The Boston Chronicle (Sept. 4-7, 1769 - Jan. 18-22, 1770). His valedictory oration, An Essay on the Uses and Advantages of the Fine Arts, which was promptly printed in 1770, was distinguished by its early plea for the abandonment of neo-classical rules in poetry; but the verses which concluded the oration were an egregious example of the very practices its thesis had condemned.
Graduated and awarded a Berkeley fellowship in 1767, he continued his studies at Yale for three years more. After receiving his master's degree in 1770, he spent a year in Wethersfield, Connecticut, studying law, writing verse, and (probably) teaching school.
Career
Upon returning to Yale in 1772 as a tutor, he soon commenced the composition of his comic satire on the abuses of collegiate instruction, The Progress of Dulness, a poem of seventeen hundred lines in octosyllabic couplets.
Published in three parts during 1772 and 1773, it provoked local storms of criticism; but it pleased impartial judges and was reprinted in 1794, 1797, and 1801.
During the second year of his tutorship Trumbull also brought to completion a series of thirty-eight essays, begun in 1770 under the pen-name, "The Correspondent, " which he published in The Connecticut Journal (February 23-July 6, 1770; February 12-September 3, 1773).
Having passed his bar examination in 1773, Trumbull moved to Boston, there to continue his legal studies under John Adams, whose confidential friend he remained for many years.
In Boston, Trumbull gained some of the political background for his comic epic, M'Fingal; but the poems that he wrote at the time showed him to be still dominated by the duller vices of the age of Pope.
His first poem reflecting national affairs, An Elegy on the Times (1774), a glittering, bombastic piece, bore a patriotic message that was vitiated by the poet's untimely note of caution against violence.
When Adams left Boston in August 1774, Trumbull retired to the relative security of New Haven, where he commenced the practice of law. He remained at New Haven until the menace of a British invasion in 1777 influenced him to withdraw to his native hamlet, Westbury.
In 1781 he established himself at Hartford. In the fall of 1775, at the suggestion of "some leading members of the first Congress, " Trumbull wrote the initial canto of M'Fingal. This was published early in 1776 with a 1775 imprint. After the war, he divided this part into two cantos and wrote two additional ones. The whole work, containing approximately three thousand lines, was first published at Hartford in 1782. The framework of the poem is a loosely unified narrative of the misfortunes of the Tory squire, M'Fingal; but the poem virtually constitutes a comprehensive review of the blunders and cowardice of the British leaders throughout the Revolution. Despite its pro-Whig bias, the efficacy of M'Fingal as an agent of anti-Tory propaganda has been exaggerated. It had but three editions during the war, whereas Paine's Common Sense, published at the same time, had a sale of more than one hundred thousand copies within a few months.
He invested his poem with literary qualities which received their fullest recognition after the war, when, despite Puritan prejudice against satirical poetry, M'Fingal was accepted as an important contribution to belles-lettres.
Its inexhaustible wit, its air of learning without pedantry, and its buoyant Hudibrastic couplets that fitted snugly in the memory made it a cherished possession of the American people in an era when good native poets were not plentiful. Reprinted more than thirty times between 1782 and 1840, it was the most popular American poem of its length before Longfellow's Evangeline.
he merits of M'Fingal gave Trumbull the position of literary leader of the "Hartford Wits" during the eighties and nineties. Notwithstanding the grave competition of Dwight and Barlow, however, he did little to sustain his reputation.
After 1782 he commenced no poetry of major importance; his small part in "The Anarchiad, " which appeared in The New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Magazine (1786 - 87), and in The Echo (1807), first published in the American Mercury, his miscellaneous newspaper verses and critical essays, and his lexicographical assistance to Noah Webster merely called attention to his declining creative powers. His literary defection, however, was balanced by his increasing interest in law and politics.
He first held office in 1789, when he became state's attorney for the county of Hartford.
In 1792 and 1800 he was elected to the state legislature. He was appointed judge of the superior court of Connecticut in 1801 and judge of the supreme court of errors in 1808. Both of these positions he held until he was removed from office by politics in 1819. Although the jurist thus survived the poet, the latter was not forgotten. In 1820 The Poetical Works of John Trumbull was issued in two volumes.
The last six years of his life Trumbull spent at Detroit, Mich. , where he died at two in the morning on May 11, 1831.
Though a patriot, Trumbull was not a fiery revolutionist of the stripe of Paine or Freneau. His principal powers were intellectual and critical rather than emotional.
After the Revolution, like most of the "Hartford Wits, " he became a strong Federalist.
Despite its pro-Whig bias, its reputation as anti-Tory propaganda has been exaggerated.
Membership
He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Connections
On November 21, 1776, he married Sarah Hubbard, by whom he had two sons and two daughters.