Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
Peck lived on not only to marry but to become a Virginian. Fithian died
as a chaplain in the Revolutionary army; but for more than a year after the
letter to Peck he continued to endite sprightly, charming letters to this
southern plantation family which had entered his heart too. To intellectual
Councilor Carter or to the younger daughters, Fithian found something
tactful and graceful and appropriate to say, catering to the interests of each
correspondent. As he admitted, he learned as much in the South as he had
been able to impart there.
Letters from Maryland were concerned with many of the same problems
as those of Virginia, though those relating to church government dug
perhaps more deeply into the American-bishop problem than did the Virginia
epistles. There was an occasional dialect letter in a newspaper; there
were scientific and philosophical addresses to newspaper editors or to
British botanists. Several of the Dulanys wrote effectively, including Daniel
Senior and Junior, Lloyd, and Walter, both in private and in the public
presses of Annapolis and Philadelphia. The same may be said of the
Bordleys-the two Stephens, Thomas, and John Beale.151 And the three
volumes of Governor Horatio Sharpe's letters in the Archives of Maryland
are rich in many things.
Perhaps the most interesting letter writers were the contemporaries and
friends the Reverend Thomas Bacon, Henry Callister, and Dr. Alexander
Hamilton, and the slightly later parson Jonathan Boucher, the Loyalist.
Bacon, already referred to in previous chapters for his sermons, charity
school, and musical abilities, was an indefatigable epistolarian. The Maryland
Diocesan Library includes several of his letters to his good friend and
fellow-musician Henry Callister, on concerts, methods of teaching music
to children, reading matter, and social engagements. In the Fulham Papers
in the Lambeth Palace Library are some of his letters to church officials in
England and to his brother, the wealthy industrialist Anthony Bacon,
fellow member of the Tuesday Club. To Anthony he wrote strongly against
the pretensions of Marylander Johnson, who was on his way back to London
to take holy orders. Bacon declares him to have been a drunken and
uneducated schoolmaster who could not even construe a passage of Virgil
and certainly should not be considered for the ministry.
A 1750 letter to the secretary of the S.P.G. acknowledging receipt of
useful books presents a vivid picture of the state of the Anglican church
in the province and something of Bacon's own conservatism. One portion
of a paragraph is revealing enough.
Tindal's Christianity & c. is gOt into most houses where any body reads:
but his confused obscurity and the wont of learning among the generality
of our readers, make him of little more service to the cause, than
to possess them with a conceit that there is something very deep in him