Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
journal have some significance for several reasons. In Virginia, as in Maryland,
is a body of still unpublished or recently published verse which never
got into the Gazette. In addition, curious and often genuinely poetic
epitaphs from official and unofficial county and personal records or from
gravestones continue to emerge and enlarge and enrich the body of Virginia
colonial poetry. And then there is an impressive number of elegies
borrowed from British journals or books which at least reflect the taste of
southern colonial readers.
Probably the earliest surviving eighteenth-century formal Virginia elegy
appears in the Philadelphia American Weekly Mercury of September 14,
1732, presumably reprinted from a lost issue of Parks' Maryland Gazette.
Perhaps written by William and Mary professor and later president William
Dawson, it is a pastoral tribute to the most powerful and wealthy
Virginian of his generation. This is "A Poem, Sacret to the Memory of the
Honourable Robert Carter, Esq; Late President of His Majesty's Council,
in the Colony of Virginia. Who departed this life on Friday the 4th of
August, 1732, in the 69th year of his Age:' The colloquy or dialogue is
between Lycidas and Philenus. Beginning with the avowed desire to produce
both a pleasing and an instructive song, the shepherds state that
"Great Carter's dead" and then proceed to analyze his virtues.
His Smiles proceeded from his human thoughts
His Frowns not bent on Persons, but on Faults.
His just Acquests his well-pois'd Soul maintain'd
Above all Fraud, nor by Ambition stain'd.
His generous Heart with Malice could not swell,
And knew no Pride but that of doing welL
Readers of Carter's letters may or may not agree fully with this praise, but
it never grows too fulsome. The poem is one of the better colonial elegies,
worthy to compare with the best of the Maryland poems in the same pastoral
tradition. Despite vague references to "blest Spirits," this is another
essentially secular classical elegy, concentrating on the portrait of a great
man worthy to be compared with ancient Graeco-Roman heroes.129
Equall y as prominent as Carter in the same period, though for somewhat
different reasons, was Sir John Randolph, the learned jurist who died in
1737. On April S, 1737, in both Latin and English, an elegy containing (in
the English version ) twenty-eight heroic couplets and two triplets was
printed in the Virginia Gazette. Though it has been attributed to Commissary
James Blair, who is known to have composed Latin verses at least
for other occasions, Sir John's reputation as a deist or agnostic may have
prevented the ecclesiastical dignitary from employing his pen upon this
subject. It is probably by some less elevated member of the William and
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