Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
number of verses in both British and American periodicals. In the Imperial
Magazine, usually under the pseudonym of "Prometheus," appeared several
of his pieces, among them, in the July 1762 issue, "An Epitaph on a Lady,"
beginning perhaps in irony or mockery, "Here lie, beneath this heap
of stones / What once were lov'd Amanda's bones." In the September
1764 London Magazine Bolling published "Madrigal, attributed to Abbe
Chaulieu, imitated, in Memory of Mrs. M. Bolling," a six-line tribute to
his wife Mary Burton Bolling.lss Close kin in elegiac spirit to these is the
prose piece "A Pathetic Soliloquy, Written by Robert Bolling, Esquire,
of Virginia, in the Year 1764." This is a melancholy meditation on
"Lavinia," to whom the first-person narrator had been married. The description
of the lost loved one (probably his wife just noticed ) is startlingly
like those of the departed ladies of Poe-Ligeia, Madeline Usher, Morella,
and a dozen others. The conclusion of the piece is a series of almost morbid
lamentations in vocative form and language.1s7
In Rind's Virginia Gazette of May 16 [or 26?}, 1766, were nineteen
lines "On the Death of the Hon. John Robinson, Esq." and on January I,
1767, an "Epitaph on Thomas Banks, alias Williams, the ostler, the singing
boy, the pirate, the fiddler, the schoolmaster, the clerk of Jefferson's church,
in Chesterfield, and finally an honest man." Beginning with two Latin lines
from Ovid, the alternating rhyme goes on thus:
Here lies a wight, whose heart was great,
Whos soul ambitious wish'd to fly,
Beyond the bounds prescrib'd by fate
In him 'twas prudence, sure, to die.
Probably by a Virginian is "To the Manes of Captain Spotswood, whose
Bones were lately found near Fort Duquesne now Pittsburg," which appeared
in B. Martin's Miscellaneous Correspondence (London, 1764, III,
81). This concerns the able son of the former governor.
Courageous youth, were now thine honour'd sire
To breathe again, and rouze his wonted fire;
Nor French, nor Shawnoe durst his rage provoke,
From great Potomac's springs to Roanoke.
Twenty more lines extol the brave young man who died for his country
by "fair Ohio's blushing waves." lS8
As in Maryland and South Carolina, Virginia literary tastes are indicated
by the elegies printed in the local newspaper from outside sources.
Some are concerned with departed royalty, as "An Epitaph on her late
Majesty [Queen Caroline}" (May 19, 1738) and "On the Death of His
late Serene Highness the Prince of Orange" (Virginia Gazette, February
13, 1752) . But there were epitaphs on less exalted persons, as that "on
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