50 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



father's influence on his son has already been stressed. William's 

 own gentle, benign temperament and his Quaker precepts en- 

 hanced this influence. And the age in which he lived encouraged 

 this impulse towards pity and sensibility. A few examples culled 

 from eighteenth-century English poetry at once indicate the 

 closeness of William Bartram to the thought currents of his age. 

 Thomson pitied the hare hard beset 



By death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs, 

 And more unpitying men . . . (Winter, 257-260) 



and questioned what the flocks had done to merit death ? (Spring, 

 358-360) " And the plain ox," he asked further, " In what has 

 he offended.^" He whose toil 



Patient and ever ready, clothes the land 



With all the pomp of harvest — shall he bleed, 



And struggling groan beneath the cruel hands 



Even of the clowns he feeds? (Spring, 364-368) 



Henry Baker in The Universe, published in 1727 — a year after 

 Thomson's Winter — asserted that 



Though to kill there may be some pretence, 

 When raging hunger bids, or self-defence; 

 No cause beside can justify the deed. 

 'Tis murder if not urg'd by real need. 



John Dyer thought that 



Ev'n to the reptile every cruel deed 



Is high impiety. (The Fleece, II, 22-23) 



Richard Jago mourned the death of a blackbird shot by a hunter. 

 He apologized for mankind to both the dead blackbird and his 

 surviving mate: 



Divided pair! forgive the wrong. 



While I with tears your fate rehearse, 



I'll join the widow's plaintive song, 

 And save the lover in my verse. 



(The Blackbirds: An Elegy) 



Bartram, not being a rhymster, expressed his sentiments on 

 the subject in terms which sound more sincere, though no less 



