Author: Umphraville, Angus
Biography:
UMPHRAVILLE, Angus (b c. 1798)
Umphraville, probably a Scottish immigrant, made a splash in three or four regions of America between 1817 and 1821 and then vanished from sight. He published The Siege of Baltimore in 1817, declaring his age as nineteen on the title-page; in Pittsburgh in 1820 delivered (first apologizing for his youth) an Oration about a naval officer killed in a duel; and brought out Missourian Lays in St. Louis in 1821. In Philadelphia in 1818 he advertised a long inscription for a monument for General David Humphreys (1752-1818) which was not taken up; other references to him in the Philadelphia press are from the dead-letter office. At that time he was already claiming authorship of "The Allegeniad, and Other Original Poems," works of which no trace has survived. All his publications make a great display of learning, with quotations in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. In the first collection, he declares that he deliberately chose as his models some of the more recherché classical authors, "Archilochus, Arion, Lasus, Pindar, Melanipides," etc. No records of birth, immigration, or death have been discovered. (WorldCat; Franklin Gazette [Philadelphia] 20 Apr. 1818; George Fraser Black, Scotland's Mark on America [1921] 82)