Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN TH E COLONIAL SOUTH '
The turn of phrase is always graceful. He looked at himself and his fellow
men with a certain equanimity, sometimes tinged with the cynical or the
serene: "We play the Fool . .. 50 or 60 years, what Prodigys then should
we grow up to in double that time? And why should the figure of our
constitutions be lengthened out when the odds are great, we should make
a bad use of them." This was in I739. Twenty years earlier he had been in
a less disillusioned mood when he wrote : "God almighty is ever contriving
our happiness, and does many things for good which appear to
our short sight to be terrible misfortunes. By the time the last act of the
play comes on, we grow convinced of our mistake, and look back with
pleasure on those scenes which first appeared unfortunate." 149
Country gentlemen such as Henry Wood of Goochland, and his correspondent
Benjamin Waller of Williamsburg, wrote sprightly letters in
both prose and verse, with and without satiric implications. lees and Randolphs,
nurtured in the articulate, wrote in the decades before the Revolution
scores of letters, some of them designedly exercises in expression.
Princeton-educated tutor Philip Fithian interlards his journal with letters
to male college friends, to young ladies, to older gentlemen. One of his
more revealing was addressed to John Peck, another Princetonian who
was to succeed him as teacher in the Nomini Hall family of Carters and
would eventually marry into that family. Fithian's is a long letter of hints
and advice, advice based on his own experience among the Northern Neck
planter aristocracy. The New Jersey youth of Presbyterian background,
Fithian warns, will find himself in a southern Anglican society well worth
observing:
You come here, it is true, with an intention to teach, but you ought likewise
to have an inclination to learn. At any rate I solemnly injoin it upon
you, that you will never suffer the spirit of a Pedagogue to attend you
without the walls of your little Seminary. In all promiscuous Company
be as silent & attentive as Decency will allow you, for you have nothing
to communicate which such company, will hear with pleasure, but you
may learn many things which, in after life, will do you singular service.­
In regard to Company in general, if you think it worth the while to attend
to my example, I can easily instruct you in the manner of my Conduct in
this respect. I commonly attend Church; and often, at the request of
Gentlemen, after Service according to the custom, dine abroad on Sunday
. . . . The last direction I shall venture to mention on this head, is,
that you abstain totally from Women. What I would have you understand
from this, is, that by a train of faultless conduct in the whole course
of your tutorship, you make every Lady within the Sphere of your acquaintance,
who is between twelve & forty years of age, so much pleased
with your person, & so fully satisfied as to your abilities in the capacity
of-a Teacher.I5o