Word: fingal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...FINGAL by JOHN TRUMBULL 44 pages. J. Almon. 1 shilling...
...Fingal, savagely mocks Tory pieties...
...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England hamlet where, in traditional fashion, citizens "met, made speeches full long winded,/ Resolved, protested, and rescinded."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...
...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...