Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
Horatio Sharpe, a somewhat intellectual man of taste, left a number of interesting
and very rhetorical communications which have been gathered
together in several volumes of the Archives of Maryland. Epistles by all
these officials to archbishops and bishops or to Commissary Bray are scattered
among the printed documents of the Anglican church in the colonies.
Other letters addressed to the Lords of Trade and the Plantations, to members
of the Privy Council, or to resident colonial officials of lesser rank
also exist, sometimes in printed collections but often only by title and
abstract in the British Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and
the West Indies mentioned frequently in preceding chapters. Usually
the governors wrote clearly and--on personal matters-with engaging
warmth and sometimes graceful rhetoric. This latter quality is especially
true for the known epistles of Sir William Gooch and, at his best, of
Alexander Spotswood. On the other hand, Nicholson and Dinwiddie and
Spotswood could be most irascible or biting in their comments.
The considerable body of letters written by Maryland and Virginia
churchmen has been taken up directly and indirectly in the chapters above
on religion. Commissaries and ministers of parishes and S.P.G. missionaries
(in some colonies the latter two ecclesiasts were one and the same)
wrote many of the most informative and spontaneous of these, some of
them quite impressive in their unstudied style. So far only a few of Samuel
Davies' letters are known, but as one might expect from an able poet and
master pulpit rhetorician, they are beautifully composed, whether written
to a brother-in-law or to Anglican civil authorities.140
Naturally more letterbooks or collections of loose letters from the eighteenth
than from the seventeenth century survive in Virginia. From 1743
to his death in 1760 Joseph Ball, for example, transplanted Virginian residing
in Great Britain, kept up a steady correspondence with American
friends and relatives, including Joseph Chinn, Ellen Chichester, Benjamin
Waller, and Elizabeth Washington. He wrote about his books he wanted
sent from the colony, the care to be taken of his plantation and mansion
house and livestock, the rebuilding of the Williamsburg Capitol after the
1747 fire, a fine print of a horse, and the Parson's Cause dispute. The replies
are equally interesting, and the style of his epistles is lively. This letterbook
is in all a detailed account of economic and political and social life.141
The letters of horticulturist John Custis, now like Ball's in the Library
of Congress, include some 136 copies or drafts, fourteen of which were
written to the English Quaker botanist Peter Collinson. Scattered Custis
letters are also in various Virginia repositories, letters that show him much
engaged in business as well as in his favorite avocation of gardening. But
this educated, intelligent, eccentric man also reveals much of his own
character and of his society in all of them. They include communications
142 1