Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
event.156 In I729 Governor Everard wrote a perceptive letter to the Bishop
of London describing the religious situation and why it was so, incidentally
documenting William Byrd's comment in his "Histories" that Commissioner
John Lovick had worked his way up from valet or "footboy." Governor
Burrington in I732 in introducing a physician desiring to take holy orders
gives a similar picture of the church in that colony. Other governors including
Gabriel Johnston and Arthur Dobbs wrote frequently to various
persons in church or government.157
Dobbs, a writer of considerable ability in several areas including trade,
navigation, exploration, and religion, has left epistles now in the Fulham
Papers at Lambeth Palace, the Belfast Public Record Office, and other repositories,
many or most revealing of the man and of his colony at the
close of the French and Indian War.15S In North Carolina the one-time
surveyor-general of Ireland, whose pamphlets were said to rival in brilliance
Dean Swift'S, was carrying out the last of his countless public functions,
for he was to die in office in the colony. His letters are among the few
surviving from that province which are comparable in graceful rhetoric
and significant content to the work of the best epistolarians of the Chesapeake
or Charleston regions, though his speeches and tracts possess more
attractive belletristic qualities than do these epistles.
South Carolina, in its men of science and medicine, its governors and
lesser officials, its several distinguished clergy and lawyers and planters,
and in its learned ladies, had in the eighteenth century a remarkable group
of letter-writers. Dozens of these people over long periods kept up correspondence
with friends, relatives, and business associates abroad. The communications
of Mark Catesby and Dr. Alexander Garden and a score of
nearly as able scientists have been commented upon. Governors such as
James Glen and William Henry Lyttelton and Lieutenant-Governor William
Bull, Senior, educated and articulate men, wrote well. Among the
most valuable letters of the clergy are those of Commissary Gideon Johnston
and Dr. Francis LeJau to their ecclesiastical superiors in London, letters
which have been edited and published in this century and quoted
liberally in preceding chapters.159 The polemical published letters of the
Anglican Reverend Alexander Garden and his Whitefieldean opponents,
including the Reverend Josiah Smith, the Peter Manigault letters from
England to relatives in Carolina, Charles Woodmason's "Regulator Documents,"
the Reverend Richard Hill letterbook of I743, as well as a number
of single letters from young women have some significance and
frequently a great deal of charm. These writers had much to say, and they
were conscious of the forms in which they should express themselves.160
And then there are at least four epistolarians whose communications
have survived in quantity in letterbooks or loose papers, all recently