Pinkney and Neal involved Neal declining the duel challenge, and Pinkney declaring Neal a coward. Neal mocked this declaration in his next novel, also published in 1823. After serving without a salary as the Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Maryland, Pinkney traveled to Mexico with the intention of joining the navy there. Disheartened after being rejected, he returned to Baltimore. There, he became editor of a new semi-weekly newspaper, the Marylander, a publication founded to support the re-election of President John Quincy Adams. Its first issue was published December 3, 1827. His editorial association nearly brought him into a duel with the editor of Philadelphia-based Mercury, who supported Andrew Jackson. Suffering from depression, Pinkney died of tuberculosis on April 11, 1828, at the age of 25. He was buried in Baltimore's Unitarian Cemetery. In May 1872, his body was moved to Green Mount Cemetery, also in Baltimore. Writing Pinkney is often compared in his poetry with the Cavalier poets of Great Britain. He wrote a number of light, graceful, short poems, his longest being "Rudolph", which was published anonymously in 1825. His first full collection of poetry was published the same year. He was influenced by the work of Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott and other English writers. He was not influenced by American poets. Pinkney was also inspired by classical works, which were part of an upper class education. He referred to such writers as Ovid, Herodotus, Horace, and Petrarch in his work. He was posthumously included in Rufus Wilmot Griswold's influential anthology The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). Critical assessment Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was an admirer of Pinkney's work as was Edgar Allan Poe. The latter relied on Pinkney's poem, "A Health", to publicly woo Sarah Helen Whitman at a lecture in December 1848. Poe mentions "A Health" in his essay "The Poetic Principle" to exemplify his own aesthetic theory and the association between whiteness, purity, and love. He wrote that Pinkney would have been better appreciated as a poet if he had been born in New England: It was the misfortune of Mr. Pinckney to have been born too far south. Had he been born a New Englander, it is probable that he would have been ranked as the first of American lyricists, by that magnanimous cabal which has so long controlled the destinies of American Letters". "A Health"