Hamilton's Literary History of the Maryland Gazette

Abstract

HE best belletristic essay of colonial Maryland appeared in the Maryland Gazette for June 29, 1748. Signed with the well-known name of the seventeenth-century author of Los Suenos, Don Francisco de Villegas, this essay is actually a literary history of the first three years of the Maryland Gazette. It criticizes nearly all the writings, literary and political, by local authors that had appeared in the paper since Jonas Green had started it in the early spring of 1745. There are many earlier examples of literary criticism in America, but this is the first criticism of a large body of American authors. Quevedo briefly characterizes every local author and often compares him with other provincial writers. Aside from its intrinsic literary worth, the essay is valuable because it tells what a cultivated, contemporary observer thought of the local productions of the colonial press, and especially because it testifies to the importance of the newspaper in the intellectual life of the colonist. Obviously Quevedo had a complete file of the Maryland Gazette from I745, and read every issue thoroughly and critically. Furthermore, Quevedo helps us to identify the authors of the anonymous and pseudonymous poems and essays in the Gazette, including the prolific poet James Sterling and Franklin's old enemy, John Webb(e). The author skillfully fuses several literary genres. The pseudonym tells the reader that the writer is deliberately imitating the form of the satiric Lucianic tradition, best known to English readers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through Sir Roger L'Estrange's paraphrase of Quevedo's Visions.1 The tour through hell also recalls the greatest of all descriptions of descents into hell, Dante's Inferno. And so our colonial author mocks himself even in the selection of his literary form, for here in the