The Sot-Weed Factor

PART IV: THE AUTHOR APOLOGIZES TO HIS READERS; THE LAUREATE COMPOSES HIS EPITAPH

Lest it be objected by a certain stodgy variety of squint-minded antiquarians that he has in this lengthy history played more fast and loose with Clio, the chronicler's muse, than ever Captain John Smith dared, the Author here posits in advance, by way of surety, three blue-chip replies arranged in order of decreasing relevancy. In the first place be it remembered, as Burlingame himself observed, that we all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt. Thus Being does make Positivists of us all. Moreover, this Clio was already a scarred and crafty trollop when the Author found her; it wants a nice-honed casuist, with her sort, to separate seducer from seduced. But if, despite all, he is convicted at the Public Bar of having forced what slender virtue the strumpet may make claim to, then the Author joins with pleasure the most engaging company imaginable, his fellow fornicators, whose ranks include the noblest in poetry, prose, and politics; condemnation at such a bar, in short, on such a charge, does honor to artist and artifact alike, of the same order of magnitude as election to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum or suppression by the Watch and Ward.

Thus much for the rival claims of Fact and Fancy, which the artist, like Governor Nicholson, may override with fair impunity. However, when the litigants' claims are formal, rather than substantial, they pose a dilemma from which few tale-tellers escape without a goring. Such is the Author's present plight, as he who reads may judge.

The story of Ebenezer Cooke is told; Drama wants no more than his consent to Joan Toast's terms, their sundry implications being clear. All the rest is anticlimax: the stairs that take him up to the bridal-chamber take him down the steep incline of denouement. To the history, on the other hand, there is so much more — all grounded on meager fact and solid fancy — that the Author must risk those rude cornadas to resume it, and trust that the Reader is interested enough in the fate of the twins, their tutor, Bertrand Burton, Slye and Scurry, and the rest, to indulge some pandering to Curiosity at Form's expense. .

Andrew Cooke's conviction (which he voiced innumerable times in the course of that night's rundlet and next morning's wedding breakfast) that the sun had set on their troubles forever and would rise thenceforth not only on a happy and prosperous family, but on a happier and nobler Province as well, was — alas! — by no means entirely borne out by history. Indeed, with the possible exception of William Smith the cooper and Captain Mitchell the opium merchant — both of whom disappeared from Clio's stage not long afterwards, never to be heard from to this day — it cannot be said that the life of any of our characters was markedly blissful; some, to be sure, were rather more serene, but others took more or less turns for the worse, and a few were terminated far before their time.

Tom Tayloe, for example, the corpulent dealer in indentured servants, was released from his own servitude at Malden immediately upon promising to press no charges against McEvoy; one hoped his experience would lead him into a less unsavory trade, but within the week he was peddling redemptioners again all over Talbot County, and a few years later he was throttled to death on Tilghman's Island by one of his investments — a giant Scot with all of McEvoy's passion for liberty and none of his resourcefulness. No more fortunate was Benjamin Spurdance, "the man who had naught to lose": Andrew discovered him in the jail in Annapolis, serving a sentence for petty thievery, and restored him to his former position as overseer of the tobacco-fields on Cooke's Point, but vagrancy and despair had so debilitated him that, the very next winter, an ague robbed him forever of the only thing he had not previously lost.

It may be said of Colonel Robotham, who succumbed to a like infirmity in April of 1698, that Life owned him no more years; but who will not regret that his journey ended, not in disgrace — which, when complete, can be as refreshing as success — but in embarrassment? A collaborator in the revolution of '89 and a Councilman under both royal governors of Maryland, he and four similarly flexible statesmen fled cravenly to England in 1696, when Nicholson opened his prosecution of their former leader. To add to his humiliation, Lucy never found a husband. Her child, a girl, was born as it had been conceived, out of wedlock, and raised on the Colonel's estate by his widow. Lucy herself fell farther and farther from respectability: abandoning her child, she lived openly in Port Tobacco as the mistress of her seducer, the Reverend Mr. Tubman, until that gentleman and his colleague, the Reverend Peregrine Cony, were suspended by their bishop in 1698 on charges of drunkenness, gambling, and bigamy. Of her life thereafter nothing positive is known, but one is distressed to hear of a young prostitute in Russecks's Tavern (which Mary Mungummory purchased from Roxanne's estate and operated jointly with Harvey Russecks) who achieved some fame among the lower-Dorset trappers by reason of "a Beare upon her bumm"- could it have been a freckled Ursa Major?

At least the Colonel was spared the chore of arranging a second annulment for his daughter, inasmuch as she became a widow before she was a mother. Poor Bertrand, after that final lucid hour with Ebenezer, lapsed first into prolonged delirium, in the course of which he accepted the worship of "Good Saint Drakepecker," held forth as Poet Laureate of Brandon's Isle, and deflowered harems of Betsy Birdsalls and Lucy Robothams; then he sank into a coma, from which Burlingame and a physician strove in vain to rouse him, and three days later died in his bed at Malden. Ebenezer was greatly saddened by his death, not only because he felt some measure of responsibility for it, but also because the ordeals they had survived together had given him a genuine affection for his "adviser"; yet just as scarlet fever may cure a man of the vapors, so his distress as losing Bertrand was eclipsed by the far more grievous loss that followed on its heels: Joan Toast, as everyone expected, succumbed before the year was out — on the second night in November 1695, to be exact — but it was neither her opium nor her pox that carried her off. Without them, to be sure, she would have survived; they felled and disarmed her; but the coup de grâce — by one of those monstrous ironies that earlier had moved Ebenezer to call Life a shameless playwright — was administered by childbirth! Hear the story:

After that evening which regained Cooke's Point for Ebenezer (and ended our plot) there was a general exodus from Malden. Governor Nicholson, Sir Thomas Lawrence, William Smith, and Richard Sowter sailed for Anne Arundel Town the next day, and the militiamen went their separate ways; Burlingame tarried until he could do no more for Bertrand and then struck out alone on his perilous embassy to Bloodsworth Island, promising to return in the spring and marry Anna — to which match her father had consented. John McEvoy and Henrietta, on whom Andrew also bestowed his blessing, were married soon after in the parlor at Malden (to the tearful joy of the Parisienne in the kitchen) and sailed for England as soon as Sir Harry's will was probated; moreover, contrary to the general expectation, Roxanne went with them, whether because her old love for Andrew had not got the better of her grievance, or because she deemed herself too old for further involvements or too scarred by her life with the brutish miller, or for some other, less evident reason. Andrew followed them, leaving Malden to the care of his son and Ben Spurdance, and it pleased the twins to conjecture that Roxanne meant to marry their father after all, but not before repaying him in his own coin. However, if Andrew entertained hopes of winning her by siege, they were never realized: on the income from her estate she toured Europe with her daughter and son-in-law. McEvoy went through the motions of studying music with Lotti in Venice, but apparently lost interest in composition; he and Henrietta lived a childless, leisurely life until September of 1715, when they and Roxanne, along with fifty other souls, set out from Piraeus in the ship Duldoon, bound for Cadiz, and were never heard from again.

By spring, then, everyone had left except the twins and Joan Toast, and life at Malden settled into a tranquil routine. Ebenezer did indeed contract his wife's malady, which, though virtually incurable, he contrived to hold in check by means of certain herbs and other pharmaceuticals provided him earlier by Burlingame, so that for the time at least he suffered only a mild discomfort; and after the first two weeks Joan's health grew too delicate to permit further physical relations with her husband. The three devoted most of their time to reading, music, and other gentle pursuits. The twins were as close as they had ever been at St. Giles, with the difference that their bond was inarticulate: those dark, unorthodox aspects of their affection which had so alarmed them in the recent past were ignored as if they had never existed; indeed, the simple spectator of their current life might well have inferred that the whole thing was but a creation of Burlingame's fancy, but a more sophisticated observer — or cynical, if you will — would raise an eyebrow at the relish with which Ebenezer confessed his earlier doubts of Henry's good will, and the zeal with which he now declared that Burlingame was "more than a friend; more e'en than a brother-in-law-to-be: he is my brother, Anna — aye, and hath been from the first!" And would this same cynic not smile at Anna's timid devotion to the invalid Joan, whom every morning she helped to wash and dress?

The equinox passed. In April, true to his word, Burlingame appeared at Malden, for all the world an Ahatchwhoop in dress and coiffure, and announced that, thanks to the spectacular effect of the Magic Aubergine (for which, owing to the season, he had substituted an Indian gourd), his expedition had achieved a large measure of success: he was positively enamored of his new-found family and much impressed by Quassapelagh and the able Drepacca — whose relations, he added, had deteriorated gratifyingly. He felt confident that he could get the better of them, but of his brother he was not so sure: Cohunkowprets, thirsty for blood, had the advantage of copper-colored skin, and the problem of deposing him was complicated by Burlingame's great love for him. His work there, Henry concluded, was not done; he had planted the seeds of faction, but after marrying Anna he would be obliged to return to the Island for the summer, to cultivate them properly.

His appearance disrupted the placid tenor of life at Malden. Anna had grown increasingly nervous with the coming spring, and now she seemed positively on the verge of hysteria: she could not sit still or permit a moment's lull in conversation; her moods were various as the faces of the Chesapeake, and changed more frequently and less predictably; a risque remark — such as Ebenezer's, that he had seen dried Indian gourds in Spurdance's cabin on the property — was enough to send her weeping from the room, but on occasion she would tease her brother most unkindly about his infection and speculate, with deplorable bad taste, what effect the eggplant-plaster might have on it. Burlingame observed her behavior with great interest.

"You do want to wed me, Anna?" he asked at last.

"Of course!" she insisted. "But I'll own I'd rather wait till the fall, when thou'rt done with the Salvages for ever and aye

Henry smiled at Ebenezer. "As you wish, my love. Then methinks I'll leave tomorrow — The sooner departed, the sooner returned, as they say."

To what happened in the interval between this conversation, which took place at breakfast, and Burlingame's departure twenty-four hours later, Ebenezer could scarcely have been oblivious: the very resoluteness with which he banished the thought from his mind (only to have it recur more vividly each time) argues his awareness of the possibility; his sudden need to help Spurdance oversee the afternoon's planting argues his approval of the prospect; and his inability to sleep that night, even with cotton in his ears and the pillow over his head, argues his suspicion of the fact. Anna kept to her room next morning, and the poet was obliged to bid his friend good-bye for the two of them.

"The fall seems terribly distant," he observed at the last.

Henry smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "Not to the fallen," he replied. "Adieu, my friend: methinks that prophecy of Pope Clement's will come to pass."

These were his final words to the poet, not only for the day and season, but forever. Later that day Anna declared her fear that Burlingame would remain with the Ahatchwhoops all his life, and much later — in 1724 — she confessed that she had sent him away herself in order to be, literally and exclusively, her brother's keeper. In any event, unless a certain fancy of Ebenezer's later years was actually the truth, they never saw or heard from their friend again. Whether owing to his efforts or not, the great insurrection did not materialize, though by 1696 it seemed so imminent that Nicholson raised the penalties for sedition almost monthly: even the loyal Piscataways, who had fed the very first settlers in 1634, were so inflamed — some said by Governor Andros of Virginia — that they abandoned their towns in southern Maryland, removed to the western mountains with their emperor (Ochotomaquath), and either starved, they being farmers rather than hunters, or were assimilated into northern groups. The great Five Nations, thanks to the efforts of Monsieur Casteene, General Frontenac, and perhaps Drepacca as well, were wooed away entirely from the English to the French, and the massacres of Schenectady and Albany would almost surely have been multiplied throughout the English provinces had the grand conspirators on Bloodsworth Island not been divided. The fact that Nicholson never mustered a force to attack the Island itself suggests both communication with and great faith in Henry Burlingame; by the end of the century the place was an uninhabited marsh, as it is today. One supposes that the Ahatchwhoops, under whatever leadership, migrated northward into Pennsylvania like the Nanticokes, and were in time subsumed into the Five Nations. On the ultimate fate of Quassapelagh, Drepacca, Cohunkowprets, and Burlingame, History is silent.

But though the twins' extraordinary friend departed, life at Malden never regained its former serenity. Anna remained in a highly nervous state; then in May it became apparent that during their brief cohabitation three months previously, Joan Toast had been impregnated by her husband. Here was a grave matter indeed, for if she carried the fetus to term, the labor of bearing it would surely kill her, and in any event the child would be born diseased; thus despite his sudden passionate desire for fatherhood, which he felt with an intensity that frightened him, Ebenezer was obliged to pray for a spontaneous early abortion. But not only were his prayers unanswered: as if in punishment for his having made them, Anna confessed in midsummer that she too was in a family way, and it took all the resources of the poet's rhetoric to dissuade her from ending her life!

"I–I'm a fallen woman!" she would lament, fascinated by the term. "Wholly disgraced!"

"Wholly," Ebenezer would agree: "as I have been since ever I came to Maryland! You must wed thy shame to mine or see me follow you to the grave!"

So it was that Anna remained at Malden, in relative seclusion, while among the servants and neighboring planters the most scandalous stories ran rife. Once Ebenezer returned ashen-faced from Cambridge and declared: "They're saying 'twas I got the twain of you with child!"

"What did you expect?" Anna replied. "They know naught of Henry, and 'tis unlikely I'd take Mister Spurdance for my lover."

"But why me?" Ebenezer cried. "Are people so evil-minded by nature? Or is't God's punishment to shame us as if we did in sooth what — "

Anna smiled grimly at his discomposure. "What ever and aye we've blushed to dream of? Haply it is, Eben; but if so, His sentence hath many a precedent. 'Tis the universal doubt of salvages and peasants, whether twins of different sexes have not sinned together in the womb; is't likely they'd think us guiltless now?"

But there is, it would appear, no shame so monstrous that one cannot learn to live with it in time: no visitors called at Malden, and Ebenezer's relations with his domestic staff and field hands grew cold and formal, but neither he nor Anna spoke again of suicide, even when it began to be clear that Burlingame was not going to return. In November Joan Toast died, and her infant daughter as well, from a breech-birth that would have carried off a much stronger woman; grief-stricken, Ebenezer buried the two of them down by the shore, beside his mother. The following January was Anna's term: her brief labor commenced late at night, and in the absence of professional assistance she was delivered of a healthy male child by Grace the cook (who had some experience of midwifery) and the poet himself. There being little likelihood that Andrew Cooke would ever return to Maryland or hear the scandal from a third party, Ebenezer thought it best not to cloud his father's old age with the truth: instead, he wrote that although Joan had expired in childbirth, their baby — a son christened Andrew III — had lived, and was being cared for by Anna. The old man, needless to say, was overjoyed.

This fiction, once established, had a marked effect on Ebenezer and his sister. Despite her shame, Anna seemed eminently suited in body and mind for motherhood: she had bloomed during pregnancy; her delivery had been easy; now her breasts were rich with milk, and lament as she might, she feasted upon her child as did he upon her, and grew plump and ruddy from the nursing. They did in fact name the child Andrew, and began to consider removing from Malden altogether as soon as feasible, "for the boy's sake. ."

But this brings us near the end of the history, and it will be necessary to digress for a moment before reaching it if we are to learn the fate of that arch-mischiefmaker John Coode, of the saucy Governor who prosecuted him, and of Lord Baltimore's grand crusade to recover his charter to Maryland, which had been confiscated by King William.

Of Coode, then, whom Nicholson was wont to call "a diminutive Ferguson in point of Government; a Hobbist in point of Religion": already in November of 1694, while Ebenezer was ill and languishing at Malden, the Governor had demanded an account of Coode's disbursement of public revenue and had charged him with, among other misdemeanors, accepting an illegal award of four thousand pounds of tobacco from the Lower House for his services to the Rebellion, stealing the records of his criminal courts for 1691, embezzling public funds in the amount of five hundred thirty-two pounds two shillings and nine-pence as chief of the Protestant Associators (not to mention four hundred more as Receiver General for the Potomac and yet another seven hundred in bills of exchange as Collector for Wicomico River), impersonating a Papist priest and an Anglican rector, conspiring against Governor and King alike, and blaspheming against the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In July of 1696, on the strength of his new evidence, Nicholson instituted proceedings against him and took depositions from divers officials and citizens on the several charges, whereupon his quarry fled to the protection of Andros in Virginia. From there (so went the rumors, for few people claimed ever to have seen him with their own eyes) he communicated secretly with his agents, particularly Gerrard Slye and Sam Scurry — the former of whom he prompted to publish "Articles of Charge" against Nicholson to the Lords Justices in London, accusing the Governor of everything from Papism and unnatural practices to the murder of one Henry Denton, Clerk of the Council and "material witness to his misdeeds." Despite his problems with privateers in the Bay, Frenchmen on the border, Indians all about the Province, and various murrains and epidemics, Nicholson contrived during this period to found a college in Anne Arundel Town (whose name had become Annapolis), defend himself against Slye's charges, and finally, in the summer of 1698, order two sloops and a hundred men to capture Coode and Slye on the Potomac River. The lesser man was apprehended and brought to justice, whereupon he immediately pled coercion by his superior; but Coode himself eluded the trap.

One is pained to learn that at this point matters were removed from the doughty Governor's hands. In an action calculated to solve a number of problems at once, His Majesty commissioned Nicholson to replace his old rival, Sir Edmund Andros, in Virginia, who, having fallen out of royal favor by his attacks on Dr. Blair of William and Mary's College, was demoted to a minor governorship in the West Indies. In January of 1699 (1698 by the old calendar) the transfer was effected, and almost at once Coode was reported to have returned triumphantly to St. Mary's County. Some said he misjudged Nathaniel Blackiston, Nicholson's successor and a nephew of Coode's own brother-in-law, inasmuch as Blackiston actually arrested him in May of the same year; others maintained that such naïveté was unthinkable in so shrewd an intriguer. It was simple collusion, they claimed, and their cynicism seems justified when one learns that in July of the following year Coode was pardoned and released at his own request, and by 1708 was actually licensed to practice law in the St. Mary's County Court! But another view, less cynical and more subtle, was advanced by Ebenezer Cooke to his sister at the time: no trace had ever been found or mention made of Captain Scurry, he pointed out, since early in the trial of Captain Slye. Was it not entirely within the scope of possibility that the man arrested and pardoned under Coode's name was this same Scurry, either in collusion with Blackiston or otherwise? Ebenezer thought it was, and thus returned to the more basic question: did the "real" John Coode exist at all independently of his several impersonators, or was he merely a fiction created by his supposed collaborators for the purpose of shedding their responsibilities, just as businessmen incorporate limited-liability companies to answer for their adventures?

In any case, one knows that John Coode never attained the grand objectives attributed to him, and neither did that shadowy figure presumed to be at the other pole of morality, Lord Baltimore — at least not in his lifetime. For however ambiguous Charles Calvert's means and motives, if he existed at all (and if Burlingame did not entirely misrepresent him) one assumes at least that he was anxious to recover his family's proprietary rights to Maryland. This much granted, he must have died in 1715 a doubly disappointed man, for not only was Maryland under the rule of her sixth Royal Governor, but his son and heir, Benedict Leonard Calvert, had two years previously renounced Catholicism in favor of the Church of England, at the expense of his annual allowance of four hundred fifty pounds. It was this very defection, however, that set in progress a swift and dramatic change in the family fortunes: Charles Calvert died on the twentieth of February, and the outcast Benedict Leonard became the fourth Lord Baltimore; but less than two months later, on April 5, Benedict himself passed on, and the title was inherited by his sixteen-year-old son, also named Charles. Now this fifth Lord Baltimore was not only a Protestant like his father, but a handsome, dissolute courtier to boot, so well respected in the royal house for his abilities at pimping and intrigue that in time he became Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. With this array of qualifications in his favor, it took him exactly one month to do what his grandfather had not managed in twenty-five years: in May of 1715, His Majesty George I restored to him the charter of Maryland, its almost monarchic original privileges intact.

These marvels alone, it seems to the Author, are sufficient evidence to convict Mistress Clio on the charge of shamelessness once lodged against her by our poet; what then is one to think on seeing this same young Baltimore, in 1728, offer to Ebenezer Cooke a bona fide commission as Poet and Laureate of Maryland? "On to Hecuba!" as our poet was wont to cry. Or, after the manner of his hybrid metaphors: let us plumb this muse's farce to its final deep and ring the curtain!

First, the Reader must know that after the burst of inspiration which drove him, during his convalescence at Malden in the winter of 1694, to compose not the promised Marylandiad but a Hudibrastic exposé of the ills that had befallen him, Ebenezer wrote no further verse for thirty-four years. Whether this fallowness was owing to the loss of his virginity, dissatisfaction with his talents, absence of inspiration, alteration of his personality, or some more subtle cause, it would be idle presumption to say, but Ebenezer was as astonished as will be the Reader to find that precisely during these decades his fame as a poet increased yearly! The manuscript of his attack on Maryland, one remembers, Ebenezer had taken with him on his shameful flight from Malden and entrusted, via Burlingame, to the captain of the bark Pilgrim. At the time, Ebenezer had been apprehensive over its safety and had exacted assurances from Burlingame that the captain would deliver it to a London printer; but in the rush of events thereafter, he forgot the poem entirely, and when, after the christening of Andrew III, Life eased its hold upon his throat, he only wondered disinterestedly whatever became of it.

His slight curiosity was gratified in 1709, when his father sent him a copy of The Sot-Weed Factor under the imprint of Benjamin Bragg, at the Sign of the Raven in Paternoster Row! The Pilgrim's captain, Andrew explained in an accompanying letter, had delivered the manuscript to some other printer, who, seeing no profit in its publication, had passed it about as a curiosity. In time it had fallen into the hands of Messrs. Oliver, Trent, and Merriweather, Ebenezer's erstwhile companions, who, upon recognizing it as the work of their friend, created such a stir of interest that the printer decided to risk publishing it. At this point, however, Benjamin Bragg got wind of the matter and asserted a prior right to the poem, on the ground that its author was still in his debt for the very paper on which it was penned. There ensued an exchange of mild threats, at the end of which Bragg intimidated his rival into relinquishing the manuscript and brought out an edition of it at 6d. the copy. The first result, Andrew declared, was a vehement denial from the third Lord Baltimore that he had in any way commissioned Ebenezer Cooke — a perfect stranger to him — as Laureate of Maryland or anything else, and a repudiation of the entire contents of the poem. There were even rumors of a libel suit against the poet, to be brought by the Lord Proprietary at such time as the King saw fit to restore him his province; in time, however, the rumors had ceased, for some favorable notices of the poem began to appear that same year. Andrew included one in his letter: "A refreshing change from the usual false panegyrics upon the Plantations. ." it read in part.". . admirable Hudibrastics. . pointed wit. . Lord Calvert's loss is Poesy's gain. ."

"What a feather in thy cap!" Anna cheered upon reading it. "Nay, i'faith, 'tis a very plume, Eben!"

But her brother, surprised as he was to learn of his sudden notoriety, was unimpressed. In fact, he seemed more annoyed than pleased by the review.

"The shallow fop!" he exclaimed. "He nowhere grants the poem's truth! 'Twas not to wax my name I wrote it, but to wane Maryland's!"

Nevertheless, in the years that followed, The Sot-Weed Factor enjoyed a steady popularity among literate Londoners — though not at all of the sort its author wished for it. Critics spoke of it as a fine example of the satiric extravaganza currently in vogue; they praised its rhymes and wit; they applauded the characterizations and the farcical action — and not one of them took the poem seriously! Indeed, one writer, commenting on Lord Baltimore's wrath, observed:

It is a curious thing that Baltimore, so anxious to persuade us of the elegance of his former Palatinate, should so hardly use that Palatinate's first Poet, when the very poem he despises is our initial proof of Maryland's refinement. In sooth, it is no mean Plantation that hath given birth to such delicious wit as Mister Cooke's. .

Such accolades chagrined and wisened the poet, who accepted not a word of them. In 1711, when old Andrew died and Ebenezer was obliged to sail to London for the purpose of probating his father's will, he permitted himself to be wined and dined by Bragg and Ben Oliver, who had become his partner in the printing-house (Tom Trent, they informed him, had renounced poetry and the Established Church to become a Jesuit; Dick Merriweather, after wooing Death in a hundred unpublished odes and sonnets, had made such a conquest of that Dark Lady that at length, his horse rearing unexpectedly and throwing him to the cobbles, she had turned into an eternal embrace what he had meant as a mere flirtation), but to their entreaties for a sequel to the poem — a Fur-and-Hide Factor or a Sot-Weed Factor's Revenge — he turned a deaf ear.

Truth to tell, he had little to say any more in verse. From time to time a couplet would occur to him as he worked about his estate, but the tumultuous days and tranquil years behind him had either blunted his poetic gift or sharpened his critical faculities: The Sot-Weed Factor itself he came to see as an artless work, full of clumsy spleen, obscure allusions, and ponderous or merely foppish levities; and none of his later conceptions struck him as worthy of the pen. In 1717, deciding that whatever obligation he owed to his father was amply satisfied, he sold his moiety of Cooke's Point to one Edward Cooke — that same poor cuckold whose identity Ebenezer had once assumed to escape Captain Mitchell — and Anna hers to Major Henry Trippe of the Dorset militia; though "their" son Andrew III was by this time a man of twenty-one and had already sustained whatever wounds the scandal of his birth was likely to inflict, they moved first to Kent and later to Prince George's County. For income, Ebenezer — now in his early fifties — performed various clerical odd-jobs as deputy to Henry and Bennett Lowe, Receivers General of the Province, with whom he became associated (the Author regrets to say) by reason of his conviction that their brother Nicholas was actually Henry Burlingame. Anna, be it said, did not permit herself to share this delusion, though she indulged it in her brother; but Ebenezer grew more fixed in it every day. If, indeed, it was a delusion: Nicholas Lowe did not in the least resemble Burlingame's past impersonation of him or any other of the former tutor's disguises, but he was of the proper age and height, possessed a curious wit and broad education, and even displayed what can only be called "cosmophilist" tendencies now and again. Furthermore, to all of Ebenezer's hints and veiled inquiries he replied with a mischievous smile or even a shrug. . But no! Like Anna, we shall resist the temptation to folie à deux: age has made our hero fond, like many another, and there's an end on it!

Two things occurred in 1728 to conclude our history. Old Charles Calvert was then a baker's dozen years under the sod and thus unable to savor, as did our poet in his sixty-second year, this final irony concerning The Sot-Weed Factor: that its net effect was precisely what Baltimore had hoped to gain from a Marylandiad, and precisely the reverse of its author's intention. Maryland, in part because of the well-known poem, acquired in the early eighteenth century a reputation for graciousness and refinement comparable to Virginia's, and a number of excellent families were induced to settle there. In recognition of this fact, the fifth Lord Baltimore (that famous young rake and dilettante referred to earlier) was moved to write a letter to the aging poet, from which the following excerpt will suffice:

My Grandfather & namesake, for all his unquestiond Virtues, was no familiar of the Arts, and thwarted in his original purpose in calling you Laureat (w^ch be it said We are confident he did, notwithstanding his later denials thereof), he was unable to perceive the value of your gift to Maryland. We do hence mark it fit, that now, when a generation hath attested the merits of your work, you s^hd accept in fact, albeit belatedly, that office & title the qualifications whereto you have so long since fulfill'd. Namely, Poet & Laureat of the Province of Maryland. .

Ebenezer merely smiled at the invitation and shook his head at his sister's suggestion that he accept it.

"Nay, Anna, 'tis a poor climate for a poet, is Maryland's, nor is my talent hardy enough to live in't. Let Baltimore give his title to one whose pen deserves it; as for me, methinks I'll to the muse no more!"

But that same year saw the death of Nicholas Lowe, which so touched the poet (owing to his delusion) that he broke his vow and his long silence to publish, in the Maryland Gazette, an Elegy on the Death of the Hon. Nicholas Lowe, Esq., containing sundry allusions to his ambivalent feelings towards that gentleman. Thereafter, either because he felt a ripening of his talents or merely because breaking one's vow, like losing one's innocence, is an irreparable affair which one had as well make the best of (the Reader will have to judge which), he was not sparing of his pen: in 1730 he brought out the long-awaited sequel, Sot-Weed Redivivus, or The Planter's Looking-Glass, which, alas, had not the success of its original; the following year he published another satirical narrative, this one dealing with Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, and a revised (and emasculated) edition of The Sot-Weed Factor. In the spring of 1732, at the age of sixty-six, he succumbed to a sort of quinsy, and his beloved sister (who was to follow him not long after), in setting his affairs in order, discovered among his papers an epitaph, which, though undated, the Author presumes to be his final work, and appends for the benefit of interested scholars:

Here moulds a posing, foppish Actor,

Author of THE SOT-WEED FACTOR,

Falsely prais'd. Take Heed, who sees this

Epitaph; look ye to Jesus!

Labour not for Earthly Glory:

Fame's a fickle Slut, and whory.

From thy Fancy's chast Couch drive her:

He's a Fool who'll strive to swive her!

Regrettably, his heirs saw fit not to immortalize their sire with this inscription, but instead had his headstone graved with the usual piffle. However, either his warning got about or else his complaint was accurate that Maryland's air — in any case, Dorchester's — ill supports the delicate muse, for to the best of the Author's knowledge her marshes have spawned no poet since Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Laureate of the Province.