PARSON RICE
[From the same]
Ye fools! I told you once or twice,
You'd hear no more from canting R——e;
He cannot settle his affairs,
Nor pay attention unto prayers,
Unless you pay up your arrears.
Oh, how in pulpit he would storm,
And fill all Hell with dire alarm!
Vengeance pronounced against each vice,
And, more than all, curs'd avarice;
Preach'd money was the root of ill;
Consigned each rich man unto Hell;
But since he finds you will not pay,
Both rich and poor may go that way.
'Tis no more than I expected—
The meeting-house is now neglected:
All trades are subject to this chance,
No longer pipe, no longer dance.
THE POET'S EPITAPH
[From the same]
Underneath this marble tomb,
In endless shades lies drunken Tom;
Here safely moored, dead as a log,
Who got his death by drinking grog.
By whiskey grog he lost his breath—
Who would not die so sweet a death?
[GEORGE BECK]
George Beck, classicist, born in England in 1749, became instructor of mathematics at Woolwich Academy, near London, at the age of twenty-seven years; but he was later dismissed. Beck married an English woman of culture and emigrated to the United States in 1795, reaching these shores in time to serve "Mad Anthony" Wayne as a scout in his Indian campaign. The wanderlust was upon George Beck, and he became one of the first of that little band of nomadic painters that came early to the Blue Grass country, and having once come remained. He arrived at Lexington in 1800; and it was not long before he began to send short original poems and spirited translations of Anacreon, Homer, Horace, and Virgil to old John Bradford's Gazette. At about this time, too, Beck was doing many portraits and a group of landscapes in oils of the Kentucky river country, a few of which have come down to posterity. Eighteen hundred and six seems to have been Beck's best year in Kentucky from the literary viewpoint, as the Gazette is full of his verses and translations. He was widely known as the "Lexington Horace." Besides painting and poetry, George Beck was a rather learned astronomer, as his Observations on the Comet of 1811 prove. With his wife he conducted an "Academy for Young Ladies" for several years. His last years were much embittered by the lack of appreciation upon the part of the Western public. The Kentucky of 1800 was not a whirlpool of art or literature by any means, and this cultured man languished and finally died among a people who cared very little for his fine learning or his manners. George Beck, poet, translator, mathematician, astronomer, artist, died in Lexington, Kentucky, December 14, 1812. His wife survived him until the cholera year of 1833, which swept away nearly two thousand citizens of Lexington and the Blue Grass.
Bibliography. Kentucky Gazette (Lexington, December 22, 1812); Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York, 1887, v. i).