Patriotic Malice

By JOHN TRUMBULL

M'FINGAL by JOHN TRUMBULL 44 pages. J. Almon. 1 shilling.

He first displayed promise as a humorist when, at the age of seven, he took the entrance examination for Yale College and passed it. Perhaps in the belief that Yale needed time to prepare for his arrival, John Trumbull waited six years before entering, then remained at the college for nine years as a student and instructor, and finally commemorated his stay with a satirical mock-epic poem called The Progress of Dulness.

Now 26, a staid, prosperous New Haven lawyer, Trumbull has printed (anonymously, to be sure, although his authorship is already known), a second and even more surprising epic satire. He has not been an incendiary Patriot by any means, yet the new burlesque,

M'Fingal, savagely mocks Tory pieties.

Trumbull stages his Tory sticking at the town meeting of an unnamed New England hamlet where, in traditional fashion, citizens "met, made speeches full long winded,/ Resolved, protested, and rescinded." Independence is the subject under debate, and the battle is between the virtuous Patriot Honorius and the affronted Royalist Squire M'Fingal. Honorius is too admirable to be very interesting, and the author devotes most of his attention to M'Fingal. The squire, writes Trumbull, is so perceptive that "not only saw he all that was,/ But much that never came to pass," adding slyly that the squire's "reasoning toil/ Would often on himself recoil."

The fun of the poem is in this recoiling; Squire M'Fingal's bombast bursts upon his own head and makes Toryism ridiculous. As the squire blunders on, he defends even Britain's encouragement of Indians "t'amuse themselves with scalping knives." As for General Gage's occupation of Boston, "his mercy is without dispute/ his first and darling attribute." The general tried to seize the stores of powder and arms at Concord merely to prevent the Patriots from harming themselves, "as prudent folks take knives away,/ Lest children cut themselves at play."

Once the wicked Revolution has been crushed, M'Fingal concludes, he and his fellow Tories will be nobles, "while Whigs subdued in slavish awe,/ Our wood shall hew, our water draw." Stout Honorius, given a few lines at last (but hardly needing any), merely says, as the town meeting adjourns:

We can't confute your second-sight; We shall be slaves and you a knight; These things must come; but I divine They 'II come not in your day, or mine.

Trumbull's closing scene is somewhat inconclusive, but he is reported to be planning additional verses. In his work so far, amiable humor and patriotic malice maintain each other nicely.

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