93
“Ode to Education,” The American Museum, or, Universal Magazine, vol. 5, no. 4 (April 1789), pp. 406–8; selection from p. 408.
Samuel Knox
On Mathew Carey and his American Museum, see selection #91. Richard Ponsonby, from Bladensburg, Maryland — who contributed the piece reprinted below — was a correspondent of Carey on other occasions as well. Samuel Knox (1756–1832) was an Irish-born Presbyterian minister who, after teaching at the grammar school in Bladensburg in 1788–89, made his way to Scotland to study at the University of Glasgow. He later returned to America, publishing An Essay on the Best System of Liberal Education (Baltimore, 1799). Interestingly, the young student, master Allen Bowie Duckett (c. 1775–1809) whose lines are reprinted below would later graduate from Princeton and was appointed by President Jefferson as associate justice of the circuit court of the District of Columbia. On Duckett, see his entry in J. Jefferson Looney and Ruth L. Woodward, Princetonians, 1791–1794: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton, 1991), although his attendance at Knox’s school goes unrecorded there: “No information on Duckett’s earlier schooling has been found, but it was far enough advanced to get him into the junior class when he entered the College in November 1789” (p. 47).
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MR. CAREY,
FROM your laudable exertions to promote virtue, patriotism, and literary merit, I am induced to crave your acceptance of the following elegant ODE to EDUCATION, written by mr. Samuel Knox, in seven stanzas, and spoken by an equal number of boys, alternately, on the conclusion of the elocutionary exercises of Bladensburgh grammar-school, under his judicious care, at an exhibition held the 18th and 19th of December, 1788. To your approbation and well-known impartiality I trust for an early admission of it in your excellent museum.
Bladensburg, February, 1789 RICHARD PONSONBY
VII.
By master Allen Bowie Duckett.
Let learned LOCKE instruct the human mind
Through each ideal labyrinth to steer,
With pious WATT, to virtue be inclin’d
Enslav’d by no enthusiastic fear.
Ne’er let the ranting bigot’s frantic strain
Blind or bewilder reason’s radiant ray—
The freeborn soul rejects with just disdain
Old cloyster’d superstition’s stupid sway.
Yet if affliction’s wounded heart tho’dst heal
Regard religion with a christian care,
And more revere an honest HERVEY’S zeal,
Than all the wit of infidel VOLTAIRE.
Ne’er warp’d in metaphysic maze, presume
On sceptic principles with haughty HUME;
But with a BEATTIE’S zeal, defend the truth—
Inspires the soul, when worldly joys decay,
With hopes of heav’n to close life’s final day—
Exalts her pow’rs, transporting thought I to gaze
Where knowledge shines in one eternal blaze.