Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· uterature, Principally Belletristic .
the late Rev. Dr. Thomas Sheridan" (January 26, 1738), friend of Jonathan
Swift and grandfather of Richard Brinsley Sheridan; and on the highwayman
William Smith, executed at Tyburn in 1750 (January 3 I, 175 I) ;
and the mock-lament, "Prince Punch's Dying Speech, calculated for a
Friendly Society of worldly Gentlemen, who met on Tuesday Night at
Jonah Coffee House in Canterbury" (January 14, 1737 ).
Thus the funeral poem or elegy was a characteristic mode of literary
expression in the colonial South, especially in the eighteenth century.
Classical and frequently pastoral in form or imagery, rarely biblical in
reference, it thus sprang from English origins quite different from those
of most of the earlier New England elegies. It could be mocking entirely
or simply ironic in part, but it was rarely sentimental and rarely grim. Its
composers took death, as they took life, in stride.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE
Despite the fact that the "Poet's Corner" was an established feature of
eighteenth-century southern colonial periodicals, the most distinguished
and abundant form of literary expression of the region and period is in
prose, including a variety of essays, some of them already commented upon.
Also there were examples of the epistolary tradition following and developed
from the seventeenth-century models in a number of directions,
a few diaries and journals possessing both historical and intrinsic interest,
and several additional interesting wills.
Tracts and pamphlets ranged from the promotional and religious and
scientific discussed in preceding chapters to the economic and political and
philosophical, most of them paralleling in subject matter the periodical
essays. There were a few narratives, including voyages and travels and
captivities as well as allegories, and at least one or two erstwhile dwellers
in the Chesapeake region tried their hand at novel writing. Some legalphilosophical-political
and some literary criticism appeared, usually in
periodicals but occasionally in the prefaces to other works such as collections
of verse. Aesthetic criticism of the fine arts has been commented upon
briefly in the preceding chapter.
Gubernatorial and legislative speeches and proclamations occupy much
of the space in southern newspapers, and southern expression of this kind
was copied in middle-colony and New England journals, even in British
magazines such as the Gentleman's and Scot's. A separate study should be
made of the debates and speeches of colonial legislators spread on the
manuscript record but not printed usually until this century. They will
merely be touched upon here and in the next chapter, but their rhetoric