89
Untitled Letter to the Editors, The New-Haven Gazette, and the Connecticut Magazine, vol. 1, no. 5 (16 March 1786), p. 38.
Anonymous
The New-Haven Gazette, and the Connecticut Magazine was a weekly paper published from 16 February 1786 through 18 June 1789. Its editors, to which this reprinted letter was addressed, were Josiah Meigs (1757–1822) and Eleutheros Dana (1761–88). Dana was the son of the Rev. James Dana (b. 1735) of New Haven. Meigs, a Yale graduate and classmate of Joel Barlow and Noah Webster, had been admitted to the bar in New Haven in 1783. At the time of his editorship of the New-Haven Gazette, he was also a city clerk. He would later make his way to Bermuda and then Georgia where, in 1801, he became the second president of the University of Georgia, teaching natural philosophy, among other subjects. On Meigs, see William Montgomery Meigs, The Life of Josiah Meigs (Philadelphia, 1887) and the entry on Josiah Meigs in the DAB. On the New-Haven Gazette see API, p. 116. This piece reminds us, humorously, that ideas circulated in early America when privately owned books were lent, even though evidence of that sort of dissemination is often difficult for historians to recover. It also reminds us that lending books is perennially dangerous.
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Messrs. Meigs and Dana,
A Gentleman in this city having lent, and by that means lost a volume of Hume’s works, found it a few mornings since, lying at his door, with the following verses.————If you have no objection, I should be glad to see them in your entertaining paper: at the same time wishing every one possessed of books which do not belong to them would follow the example.
SUCH conscious guilt,
I’ve long since felt,
I’ve not return’d your book before;
To bring home your Hume
I dare not presume,
Have therefore laid it at your door.
To lie here, Hume,
It is your doom,
’Till———— come and take you in:
Should he refuse,
And you ill use,
I’ll come and take you back again.