Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
Among the Dulany Papers (Hamilton married a daughter of that family
) there is Dr. Alexander Hamilton's letterbook for 1739-(1744? ),
made up to a considerable extent of his epistles to friends and relatives in
Scotland. As one might expect from his other writings, they are both
lively and informative. In 1739 he asks "D.B." in Scotland to "remember
me to all the members of the Whin-bush Club, especially to the Right
honourable the Lord Provost and other magistrates of that ancient and
honourable society," reminding today's reader immediately of his own
Tuesday Club. To a brother in Edinburgh he wrote of the effect of the
Jamestown weed on a child, to another relative he remarks (October 20,
1743 ) that at the request of many persons he is standing for political
office, and to yet another Scot he comments that he is not at all surprised
to hear of Whitefield's effect on weak minds. Hamilton's brother-in-law,
the Reverend David Smith, wrote in 1739, "Yours of the 29th April was
very acceptable . ... Alas! how much scotch drollery is now transplanted
to American soil: I shall be glad to know by your letters from time to time
how it thrives in a warmer climate." In a 1744 comment to this same David
Smith, Hamilton urges the latter not to allow sermon composition to clog
his mind, for
I cannot help thinking you have a poetical turn, since all people of a
lively fancy are much delighted with these ruinous objects (rugged old
rocks and pendant stones and small rivulets ) and venerable traces of antiquity
whether of art or nature. I shall imagine myself now near your
Ruinous Tower, that stands within view of your house, sitting by a brook
side, surrounded with thickets and Romantic objects and thus could break
out, addressing myself to Philosophy, under the notion of a Goddess.154
And the Annapolis physician incorporates into the letter a serious poem
"To Philosophy, a Hymn," warning his correspondent that no one is to
know its author if the recipient thinks it is bad. Here is the pre-Romantic
side of Hamilton's literary and intellectual interests, somewhat in contrast
to the Tuesday Club materials but paralleling the interest in describing
romantic scenery shown in his Itinerarium, of which a little more below.
The Reverend Jonathan Boucher came to Virginia as a schoolmaster,
returned to Britain for holy orders, and then served parishes in both Virginia
and Maryland before being "forced" to flee from the colonies in
1775 because of his militant loyalism. Elsewhere his sermons, discourses,
poems, and autobiography have been or will be noticed. Here one should
observe that he was an inveterate, dogmatic, and argumentative correspondent.
Some of his letters survive in Virginia and Maryland repositories,
others at Oxford and among the Fulham Papers at Lambeth and perhaps
elsewhere in Britain. One scholar is now gathering them all together for