Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
one reason or 3;nother most of these as well as the manuscript items already
known should be published, for only thus may intellectual historians have
sufficient primary materials for a relatively complete picture or portraiture
of the southern mind.
ESSAYS AND TRACTS, INCLUDING PAMPHLETS
More frequently printed than the personal record in the eighteenth century
was the prose essay or tract, usually in provincial gazettes but more
often as time went by in separate form by local printers. A few pieces
were published in the Scot's and Gentleman's and London Magazines, and
several were printed as pamphlets in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh. The
subjects were varied, and the moral, religious, satiric, scientific, and educational
have for the most part already been considered. Even the sentimental
or philosophical or aesthetic (especially the critical) have already
been touched upon, though some of their belletristic qualities may need
more emphasis.
The eighteenth century inherited a rich essay tradition from the seventeenth
and further enriched it during its first quarter and immediately
thereafter with the T atler and Spectator and Guardian series. Later came
the essays of Johnson and Bolingbroke and Goldsmith. And then before
the time the southern colonial gazettes were well launched there were
other British models to draw upon for liberal philosophies or religious
discussions, as the works of Trenchard and Gordon noticed above and below
such as the Independent Whig ( I720-I721) and Cato's Letters (collected
ed., 4 vols., 1724) or Ambrose Philips' Free-Thinker (17 18-1721).
And there was, of course, Jonathan Swift.
Though some recent critics have demonstrated the indebtedness of certain
essay series or individual pieces in southern periodicals to various
British essays or essay series in Great Britain or even in France, it is evident
that from the first issues of the southern gazettes the principal models
were the T atler and Spectator papers. In these last Steele and Addison had
gathered together the varied elements of the essay already existing and
formed of them an amalgam which was to endure as the popular form for
more than a century. They merged Bacon's epigrams and sententiae, Overbury's
and Earle's and La Bruyere's character writing, Nicholas Breton's
sort of epistolary writing such as was found in the manuals already mentioned,
and some of the intimacy and amusing quality of Cowley and
Temple and Montaigne. This was the vehicle which carried most of the
criticism, usable philosophy, contemplation, or vignette which might entertain
or stimulate the average reader.193 It is true that some more learned
and sophisticated southern essayists, men such as Byrd and Hamilton, are
1444