Typographia. An ode, on printing. : Inscrib'd to the Honourable William Gooch, Esq; His Majesty's lieutenant-governor, and commander in chief of the colony of Virginia. : [Three lines of quotation in Latin]

Typographia. An ode, on printing. : Inscrib'd to the Honourable William Gooch, Esq; His Majesty's lieutenant-governor, and commander in chief of the colony of Virginia. : [Three lines of quotation in Latin]

Table of contents

Title page

To the Honourable WILLIAM GOOCH, Esq His Majesty's Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in Chief of the Colony of VIRGINIA.

TYPOGRAPHIA. AN ODE, ON PRINTING.

[Page]

TYPOGRAPHIA. AN ODE, ON PRINTING.

I.

YE NYMPHS, who o'er Castalian Springs,

With joint Command preside,

Who trill the Lyre's sonorous Strings,

Record the great and glorious Things,

Of Godlike Rulers, matchless Kings,

And poetic Numbers guide;

Daughters of eternal Iove,

Gently to my Assistance move:

[Page]Whether on Pindus' lofty Top you play,

Or, with Heav'n-kindled Fire,

M [...]ouian Notes inspire,

And shew another Ilium's fatal Day;

Or, if upon the Elian Plain

You sing the Victor's glorious Deeds,

Where [...]in [...]ar lash'd his fiery-footed Steed▪

His fiery-footed Steeds impatient of the Rein

II.

Or if your more exalted Will

To those sweet Seats of blissful Quiet leads,

Where gentle CAM the slow'ry Mead.

With genial Moisture overflows;

Or, where the Silver ISIS, smooth and still.

Does, like a bashful Bride,

Into the Arms of amorous THAME

Without a Murmur glide:

Hence ADDISON, the British Maro, rose,

Thence DRYDEN soar'd the highest Pitch of Fame:

Leave, leave awhile those blest Abodes,

To view a new-arising Land,

A Land, whose fertile Plains,

And peaceful shady Woods,

May well demand

[Page]Your sweetest Notes, and loftiest Strains,

Where, with supreme Command, your own AUGUSTUS reigns.

III.

AUGUSTUS reigns;

His far-extended Sway,

Nor Length of boundless Land restrains,

Nor separating Sea.

But oh! much more extended is the Pow'r,

Than o'er the Length of boundless Land,

Or o'er the Sea's remotest Strand,

Where Goodness and paternal Care

The Sovereign's native Vertues are,

And Subjects Hearts with Loialty run o'er:

Where envious Thoughts abortive die,

Nor Malice rowls her low'ring Eye:

Where, with contending Zeal,

The Prince and People strive,

The Prince to make his People thrive,

Their Grievances to heal;

And all their good and adverse Fortune shares;

They, in Return to Him,

Pay mutual Rev'rence and Esteem,

And all his Pow'r, his Honour, Happiness, is theirs.

[Page]

IV.

Such BRITAIN is, — "Oh happy envy'd Isle,

"Sea-wall'd Commander of EUROPA's Trade,

(Mournful VIRGINIA, sighing said)

"Plac'd in thy Sovereign's Smile,

"Whose Presence, like th' enliv'ning Sun,

("Who, where his genial Rays appear,

"Productive of a fruitful Year.

"The lab'ring Hind's most greedy Hopes does bless)

"Does a diffusive Course of Goodness run,

"And ripens all thy Hopes into Success.

"Whilst I — and yet thy eldest Forei [...] Care —

"Am numb'd with Winters cold and bare,

"And toilsome Summers fruitless Harvests share.

"O happy were my Lot,

"Would that kind Sun dispense

"On me a nearer Ray of his mild Influence!

"I see his Light, I guess his Warmth, — I feel it not.

V.

She said, she sigh'd, — AUGUSTUS heard;

And straight, with willing Mind,

For her Relief prepar'd,

[Page]Her Sufferings to remove;

He knew the MAN design'd

To be VIRGINIA's future Boast and Love;

He knew His native Vertue and His Worth;

Nor long He staid,

But all Things ready made,

With eager Haste He sent Him forth.

VI.

He came, He saw, and was belov'd;

Like Lightning, quick, but strong,

An universal Gladness mov'd

Throughout th' admiring Throng.

No sooner was He seen,

His calm, yet awful Look,

Majestic, yet serene,

The very Pow'r of Prejudice remov'd,

And ev'n His Silence spoke.

But when His graceful Tongue,

Copious of Reason, did display

To Happiness, our nearest, surest Way,

Ev'n Party-Rancour dy'd away,

And private Spleen.

[Page]We found whence Britain is so blest▪

Which had so much our Envy bore,

We found — and griev'd we found it not before —

We found, that when by Love and Peace,

A Prince has fix'd his Throne

In ev'ry Subject's loial Breast,

No wonder Factions end, and Murmurs cease, —

Since now, what GEORGE is there, GOOCH here has amply shewn.

VII.

Great REPRESENTATIVE!

What Thanks shall we return? What Honours shew?

To whom our Staple does its Being owe,

By whom our Hopes revive:

By whom all Arts recov'ring live,

That erst like drooping Plants had dropt their Head▪

And once again, with native Vigour thrive:

From whom VIRGINIA's Laws, that lay

In blotted Manuscripts obscur'd,

By vulgar Eyes unread,

Which whilome scarce the Light endur'd,

Begin to view again the Day,

As rising from the Dead.

For this the careful Artist wakes,

And o'er his countless Brood he stands,

[Page]His numerous Hoards,

Of speechless Letters, unform'd Words,

Unjointed Questions, and unmeaning Breaks,

Which into Order rise, and Form, at his Commands.

VIII.

At his Commands they rise,

And cloath themselves with Sense,

Whether an antient Law that dormant lies,

The sage judicious FIVE revise,

(Great is your Care, your Pains be blest,

In all you undertake or do,

Ye separated FEW

[...] Genius of the rest▪)

Or where the newer Acts commence:

Or where, on solemn Subjects to enlarge,

In more harmonious Word▪ they shine;

New Beauties crowding every Line

Come forth their Patron's CHARGE.

There, PARKS, thy Pains are lost — We find

The Eloquence employs the Mind,

The Artist lags behind.

HIS lab'ring Thoughts with Wisdom teem,

And struggle with the mighty Birth;

[Page]Thy Art does like Lucina seem,

And only helps to send the [...]fect Embrio forth.

IX.

Yet fair befal His Fame,

And may his Mem'ry long

In latest Annals live,

Who first contriv'd the wondrous Frame,

That to dead Types supply'd a Tongue,

And Speech to lifeless Characters could give.

O well was he employ'd the while,

And happy was the vent'rous Toil!

His Breast had compass'd some great Thought,

Tho' formless yet, and void,

His busy Faculties were all employ'd,

How future Ages might be surest taught,

By old Examples, long since done,

What Paths to follow, what to shun,

How Vertue ev'n in Death befriends,

And how Ambition ends,

How Socrates instructed, Caesar fought;

Long Time, his swelling Breast

The great Idea had opprest,

'Till, fix'd at Length, be in a Rapture bid,

Come up a glorious, great Design, — And so it did.

[Page]

X.

With less Expence of Care and Thought

Did th' antient Sage surmise

The Frame, (thus Epicurus taught)

And Order of the Earth to rise;

And first he told the Dance

Of Atoms through th' expanded Vast,

With Accidents endu'd,

Of Figure, Gravity, and Magnitude;

By whose Cohesion fast,

As each to other did advance,

The homogeneous Parts ally'd,

Were in the strictest Closure ty'd,

And Matter hence arose▪

Directed thence by sightless Chance,

The jumbled Mass fortuitous was hurl'd,

Where Hap a beauteous Fabric did compose,

And made an accidental World.

XI.

Thus sung Neocles' unenlighten'd Son,

When Nature, not improv'd by Grace,

But dimly on her Vot'ries shone,

And half conceal'd her Face:

[Page] Foolish Wise-men! Nor was their Sense

Acuter to perceive a Providence.

To Us, a surer Doctrine's shewn,

Which Truth it self has spoke;

And faithful TYPES, by Time unbroke,

Through many Ages have continu'd down

The mighty Works to Them unknown

In Clouds of wilful Ignorance They err'd,

Peccant in wild Conjectures of their own,

And each his own preferr'd.

Hence some the World eternal Thought.

To Discord some its Origin assign'd,

Others a perfect Harmony could find,

Destructive of that Scheme;

All with delusive Fancies fraught,

Dreamt idle Whims — Creation only was no Dream.

XII.

Happy the Art, by which we learn

The Gloss of Errors to detect,

The Vice of Habits to correct,

And sacred Truths, from Falshood to discern!

By which we take a far-stretch'd View▪

And learn our Fathers Vertues to pursue,

Their Follies to eschew.

[Page]And may that Art to latest Times proclaim

Its PATRON's Honourable Name.

As some Sybillin Book of old,

Had Sybils known the Times to come,

Wrapt in Futurity's dark Womb,

Would thus these happy Days have told:

"Revolving Ages hence,

"In Climates now unknown,

"A Ruler's gentle Influence

"Shall o'er his Land be shewn;

"Saturnian Reigns shall be renew'd,

"Truth, Justice, Vertue, be pursu'd,

"Arts flourish, Peace shall crown the Plains,

"Where [...]OOCH administers, AUGUSTUS reigns.

FINIS.

§

§

[Page]

[Page]

TYPOGRAPHIA. AN ODE, ON PRINTING.

Inscrib'd to the Honourable WILLIAM GOOCH, Esq His Majesty's Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in Chief of the Colony of VIRGINIA.

[...] sapientum v [...]ces, plena Exem' [...]rum vetustas; qu [...]e jacerent in Tenebris omnia, nisi [...]terarum Lumen accederet.

Cic. Orat. pro Archia.

WILLIAMSBURG: Printed by WILLIAM PARKS. M, DCC, XXX.

To the Honourable WILLIAM GOOCH, Esq His Majesty's Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in Chief of the Colony of VIRGINIA.

[Page]

SIR,

THE following Piece, occasion'd by the setting up a Printing-Press in Williamsburg, justly claims a Title to some Share of Your Protection, as the Subject-Matter of it, the Art of PRINTING, owes to You its Patronage and Encouragement; whence, by a natural Deduction, this ought as necessarily to follow the Fate and Fortune of that, as Effects do their Causes.

IF upon the Prospect of a great many Advantages beyond-peradventure likely to accrue to this Colony, from an ART so long wanting among us, I have not been able to restrain my own Inclinations to write the ensuing Trifle, (the first Essay of this Kind attempted here,) I hope this at least will make it the less inexcusable, that I have said nothing herein, which, I am confident, will not be readily assented to, by all who have the Happiness to live under the present Administration, in this Colony: Unless, perhaps, this Exception be taken, that where a disinterested and unprejudic'd PATRIOTISM, [Page] (for I will not be asham'd of the Word) of a Governor to his People, and a reciprocal Affection and Obedience of them to Him is to be describ'd, the Author of this Piece may have wanted a Scale of Thought and Comprehension equal to the Height of the Merits [...] the One, or the cordial Duty of the other; and that on such a Subject it were better to be silent, than to say too little. I must confess there is some Weight in the Argument; but I seek not to palliate my Imperfections of that Nature, lest I should be answer'd with the same sarcastic Question as Albinus, a Roman Author, was by Cato, on the same Occasion, Whether any one had compelled me to write?

BUT, to obviate this Objection, I would only have Recourse to the Sense of this whole Colony, so often and so heartily express'd in their several Addresses; which I hope will freely remit me to the Moderation of ONE, whose Judgment, tho' it must censure the Weakness, whose Modesty, tho' it must tax the Boldness, yet His Candor will excuse the Endeavours of so humble a Talent as mine, who could propose no other to myself by this present Undertaking, than to manifest with what Sincerity of Observance and [...] to be thought,

SIR,

Your Honour's Most Obedient, Humble Servant, J. MARKLAND.

Information about this book

Title statement

Typographia. An ode, on printing. : Inscrib'd to the Honourable William Gooch, Esq; His Majesty's lieutenant-governor, and commander in chief of the colony of Virginia. : [Three lines of quotation in Latin]

Markland, J.

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI :

Date

2004-08.

ID [DLPS]

N02767

ID [TCP]

N02767

ID [STC]

Evans 3298

ID [NOTIS]

APX7889

ID [IMAGE-SET]

3298

ID [EVANS-CITATION]

99024778

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early American Imprints, 1639-1800 ; no. 3298.

Notes

(Evans-TCP ; no. N02767)

Transcribed from: (Readex Archive of Americana ; Early American Imprints, series I ; image set 3298)

Images scanned from Readex microprint and microform: (Early American imprints. First series ; no. 3298)

Source

— Typographia. An ode, on printing. : Inscrib'd to the Honourable William Gooch, Esq; His Majesty's lieutenant-governor, and commander in chief of the colony of Virginia. : [Three lines of quotation in Latin], Markland, J..

Extent

iv, 5-15, [1] p. ; 23 cm. (4to)

Printed by William Parks.,. Williamsburg [Va.]: :: M,DCC,XXX. [1730]. (Dedication signed: J. Markland. L.C. Wroth suggests that the author is the "John Markland, attorney, New Kent" listed among subscribers to the "Collection of acts in force in Virginia," printed in 1733 by Parks. Cf. E.G. Swem's introduction to the photographic facsimile of Typographia published at Williamsburg in 1926.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.