John Beveridge, the Neo-Latin Horatian Ode and the Narrative of British Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century North America
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John Beveridge, the Neo‑Latin Horatian Ode and the Narrative of British Colonialism in Eighteenth‑Century North America Sara Hale1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract The composition of Neo-Latin poetry was integral to the bilingual literary culture of eighteenth-century Britain, and the practice was taken by the British colonists to America. Yet the role of this Neo-Latin verse in the new political, religious and social setting of early North America has remained largely unexplored. This article examines the Latin Horatian odes published by the colonial poet John Beveridge in his Epistolae familiares (Philadelphia, 1765), a collection of Latin verse epistles. Beveridge used his Latin poetry to not only describe but justify British colonisation of North America. His appropriation of Horatian models for the colonial experience was influenced by the later reception of Horace’s poems which attributed religious and political significance to them – in order to reflect the moral, religious and cultural superiority of Christian Europeans in America. By exploring the cultural symbolism of Latin poetry, this article enables a greater understanding of the place of Neo-Latin literature in the colonial endeavour to Anglicize, Europeanize and Christianize America.
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and critiques, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a funded International Placement Scheme fellowship at the Huntington Library in 2016, during which much of the initial research for this article was conducted. * Sara Hale [email protected] 1
Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
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S. Hale
In Philadelphia in October 1758 The American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for the British Colonies published a sequence of three poems demonstrating the range of Neo-Latin activity and Horatian appropriation at work in British colonial America.1 The first was a Latin paraphrase of Psalm 104 in Horatian Alcaic stanzas by the poet John Beveridge, the second a Latin epigram praising Beveridge’s Horatian odes and naming him ‘Buchanan reborn’ (‘Buchananum quendam redivivum’) after the most famous Scottish Neo-Latin poet and Psalm paraphraser George Buchanan, and the third a comic English imitation of Horace’s Odes I.22 presented in parallel with the original Latin stanzas.2 This imitation, beginning ‘The Christian hero, pure from sin’3 and depicting the author surprised by a ‘Buffalo of monstrous size’, pays tribute to the late governor of Maryland and asserts the immunity of the Christian man from the dangers posed by the American landscape and French and Native American enemy forces. These three poems demonstrate traditional elements of Neo-Latin literature – a ‘Christianized’ Horatianism and the use of Latin poetry to address a contemporary – and provide clear evidence for a community of Latin readers and poets; but they also demonstrate the ways in which these poets turned to the imitation of Horace to describe their
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