Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
Augustine have been reprinted and discussed several times within the
past century.126 His novels on American subjects were to become quite
popular. But here he is in the classical elegiac tradition, with slight reference
to Christianity, but including a description of sympathetic nature.
It may have been sent back from South Carolina or Georgia.
There are also the British-originated elegiac borrowings in the South­
Carolina Gazette, as indicative of tastes if not of talent as the locally composed
pieces. "A Soliloquy Written in a Country Church-Yard," appearing
on July 21, 1759, a long poem of III lines, is a Theophrastian series of
character sketches as well as a pastoral elegy. Many qualities of the sentimental
and graveyard schools are here-the clock at midnight, the gloomy
yew trees, the tomb of Myra (compare Poe's "Ulalume" ) and considerable
morbid mortuary detail such as the Gothic writers employed. At the same
time it has the pastoral terms and conventions. On February 7, 1761, was
printed "Stanzas Occasioned by the Death of His late most Sacred Majesty"
in thirteen quatrains by William Woty. These verses are inferior to much
native poetry in the Gazette and were probably printed for their timeliness.
A final elegiac example form the Charleston newspaper is a thirty-fiveline
mock "Epitaph." It plays with the ancient idea of the four humors or
liquids in man's physiology. Fourteen of the lines begin with "Here lies" :
Here lies a tongue that whining talk'd,
Here lies two feet that feebly walk'd;
Here lies the midriff and the breast,
With loads of indigestion prest.
Perhaps the work of a British physician, these lines anticipate the macabre
humor of an Edgar Allan Poe.127
The last elegy to be considered from colonial South Carolina has not
been printed. It consists of three pages of "Elegiac Verses" written by Dr.
George Milligen-Johnston, a touching tribute to a child of his who died
at three and a half. It is conventional in form yet warmly personal. And it
is replete with references growing out of the physician's occupation as a
military surgeon. Symptoms, anatomy, pulse, the course of the disease:
When death at first besieg'd this little fort,
The feeble outworks were the Tyrants sport
Angina made the first attack in form
Paripneumonia took it soon by storm.128
The principal student of the southern colonial elegy and the present
writer have separately found less original or native mourning verse in the
Virginia Gazette before 1764 than in the Maryland and South Carolina
newspapers, but some of the pieces that do survive in the Williamsburg