Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
of the most interesting letters came from native-born Virginians such as
Francis Yeardley. Early letters are usually between persons in the James
town vicinity and Great Britain, but after mid-century colonials were com­
municating with other colonials, usually within their own provinces, but
occasionally with New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians.
The earliest of even the purely personal epistles were quite clearly
composed under a strong consciousness of rhetorical rules. Though the last
letters of the century reflect the greater freedom of Dryden's prose and the
fact that Defoe and Addison were just around the corner, the rhetorical
tradition is still alive in many of them and-in attenuated form, indeed­
survives in most or all the letters written before the Revolution. Anyone
who reads a considerable body of these communications and is already
somewhat familiar with English literature of the century is immediately
reminded of the popular English manuals for epistolarians which began
to appear in the sixteenth century. These little volumes are really a part
of the courtesy-book and the rhetoric-text tradition. The rules and models
presented in the more original and immediately practical of them would
indicate that they may have been most useful to the colonial letter writer,
for what he composed echoes them in many ways.
Inventories of several colonial libraries indicate that, toward the end
of the century at least, the Virginia gentleman or businessman felt that he
should own one or more of these handbooks. Prominent men such as
Arthur Spicer, Thomas Cocke, Thomas Walke, and Christopher Cocke
possessed such useful manuals as The Young Secretary's Guide (c. I687),
The English Secretorie (orig. ed. 1586), or The Young Clerk's Guide,
sometimes several in one library. Frankly utilitarian handbooks such as
J. Hill's The Young Secretary's Guide, or a Speedy Help to Learning con­
tained information even on how to compose one's will, or as a model gave
a "letter of Attorney from a Husband to a Wife upon a Voyage" or a
letter from ttA- Wife to her Husband in Foreigne Parts."4 Hill's book we
know many Virginians owned. And these and later manuals are to be
found in southern libraries up to the Revolution.
Too much should not be made of these little guides, especially in the
early years. Their subjects were the common interests of the age, and the
turns of phrase its common property. The colonist who could indite a
letter usually had a basic education in rhetoric and its principles entirely
aside from what he may have learned from letter manuals, and from the
nature of his new environment it was inevitable that he develop certain
types most fully. In the next century he would add to his models not only
new manuals, as those of Samuel Richardson, but the epistolary essays
of the Spectator and T atler and other journals. It should simply be remembered
that southern colonists might seem to write letters spontaneously,