Charles Crawford was a minor poet and prose writer whose American career covered the last twenty years of the eighteenth century. Born in Antigua, son of Alexander Crawford, a planter, Crawford was educated in England where he attended Queens College, Cambridge, until his expulsion 27 September 1773. His first published work, A Dissertation on the Phaedon of Plato (1773), was a pretentious and not very successful denial of the immortality of the soul. He then wrote a sentimental poem on love and honor, Sophronia and Hilario (1774), produced the first canto of a projected historical epic, The First Canto of the Revolution: An Epic Poem (1776)--which dealt with the reign of James II, including Monmouth's rebellion--and traced the influences of nature upon a young man in Richmond Hill: A Poem (1777). Crawford next published The Christian: A Poem in Four Books (1781), a work in which he essentially contradicted his earlier view in A...