THE RECLUSE
setts Agricultural Society erected a monument to his memory in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Fessenden, as Hemenway says, “Belongs to New Hampshire by birth, to Vermont by his education, and the larger part of his literary life, and by his last labors and death to Massachusetts”. He published many valuable and useful books during his busy career. But his chief distinction is, aside from his connection with agriculture, his rank as the first really great American satirist—the “American Butler”, (so-called by English critics), and the legitimate forerunner of Saxe and Holmes in this field, as of Lowell in the field of New England descriptive humor.
EULOGY ON THE TIMES (1800)
Thomas Green Fessenden
Let poets scrawl satirick rhymes,
And sketch the follies of the times,
With much caricaturing;
But I, a bon-ton bard, declare
A set of slanderers they are,
E’en past a Job’s enduring.
Let crabbed cyniks snarl away,
And pious parsons preach and pray
Against the vices reigning;
That mankind are so wicked grown,
Morality is scarcely known,
And true religion waning.
Societies, who vice suppress,
May make a rumpus; ne’ertheless,
Ours is the best of ages;
Such hum-drum folks our fathers were,
They could no more with us compare,
Than Hottentots with sages.
It puts the poet in a pet
To think of them, a vulgar set;
But we, thank God, are quality!
For we have found, this eighteenth century,
What ne’er was known before, I’ll venture ye,—
Religion’s no reality!
Tom Paine, and Godwin, both can tell
That there is no such thing as hell!
A doctrine mighty pleasant;
Your old-wives’ tales of a hereafter
Are things for ridicule and laughter,
While we enjoy the present.
We’ve nought to do but frisk about
At midnight ball and Sunday rout
And Bacchanalian revel;
To gamble, drink, and live at ease,
Our great and noble selves to please,
Nor care for man nor devil.
