Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
As his diurnal entries develop, so do his journey and his continued soulsearching.
Convinced of his own sinful nature, he resolves to better it,
with God's aid, and on this theme he is impelled to write again and
again.
There is factual material, as the evidence of his successful preaching, of
his meeting the great dissenters and other champions of the Great Awakening
in this country and in England and Scotland. Once out of curiosity,
in the city of "New Castle," where he knew he would not be known, he
went to see a play, ironically enough The Careless Husband, the very
piece Bolling and Bland claimed was co-authored by William Byrd II. His
only comment is "But the Entertainment was short of my Expectation."
Fears and even religious doubt assailed him as he observed the trend
toward deism of the British dissenters. Then for a time he feared that his
ship would be wrecked in the tremendous storm on the voyage home.
But the poet in him was strong, and he could thank God in meter when
the little vessel came safely through the towering waves into calm seas.
Then he observes sadly that the sailors, who spent their lives in a realm
of wonders and saw many dangers and deliverances, were generally
thoughtless, vicious, and impenitent. This dissenting southern colonial
thus concludes with an observation on man's depravity.lsl
Two other brief personal records at the end of the colonial period in
Virginia should be noted. One of 1758-1759 is a diary of William Richardson,
a Presbyterian missionary to the Cherokee Indians sent out by
Davies and his presbytery, which despite its brevity enlarges our knowledge
of missionary activity among the red men and the part such men as
Davies played in it. Richardson had a difficult time with drunken Indians
and in trying to get any natives to listen to him. Quite unlike the clergyman's
journal is that of John Mercer of Marlborough, who kept a daily
entry book, largely of his business and legal profession, from 1740 to
1748. It includes notes on plants and planting and on flowers for his
garden, and among other things the names of some other interesting contemporaries
who appear elsewhere in these pages.1S2
The last and most voluminous Virginia memoir, and in several respects
most valuable as general and intellectual history, even perhaps as literature,
is the great two-volume diary of Landon Carter, recently edited by Jack P.
Greene. Moody, intelligent, irascible, somewhat paranoid, Carter was perhaps,
according to his editor and others, the most prolific author in his
colony during the fifteen or twenty years before the Revolution, although
what must be a considerable body of political essays has not yet been fully
identified in the newspapers. Like his friend Richard Bland a master of
satire and irony and polemical prose and verse, Carter in his huge diary
presents the record of a society, of a great family, and above all of an easily
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