Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
at times more like Theophrastus or Overbury or La Bruyere than like their
British contemporaries, but they did their own amalgamating and produced
an essay not too unlike the T atler-Spectator pieces.
Essay Series in Periodicals
Taking their cue from British prose pieces and from the interests and
writing abilities of their constituencies, the principal southern news­
papers carried from their earliest years essay series on a number of subjects.
Since many were satiric in part or in whole, one element of their
character has been discussed above. But in the first extant issues of the
oldest southern colonial periodical, William Parks' Maryland Gazette,
there are the "Plain-Dealer" essays, apparently the fourth such group
chronologically in American literature, which are generally serious in tone.
Though all but two were borrowed straight from British periodicals such
as the Free-Thinker and displayed the deistic tendencies of the issues in
that journal, they are indicative of Chesapeake-region tastes, for they ran
for ten numbers.194 Later in his Virginia Gazette Parks declares that the
Guardian, T atler, and Spectator are inexhaustible mines from which mo­
rality and learning and wit can be drawn, and he proceeds to draw from
them and some other periodicals for the "good sense" of the subject and
tone of his essays of the Maryland group. The rationalistic note persists
through the series, as does the avowed borrowing from various authors.
Franklin and others had shown that deism was outspoken before 1727 in
America, though it is as impossible to "prove" Parks a deist in these pa­
pers as to "prove" Henry Callister or Sir John Randolph showing anything
more liberal in their views than the Christian rationalism of Randolph
displayed in his will and in his contemporary reputation.194
Presumably the first issue of Parks' Virginia Gazette in 1736 contained
the initial number of a new essay series, the "Monitor," since the earliest
extant issue, number six, features "The Monitor No. 6" on the first page,
though thereafter two weeks sometimes elapse between numbers, and there
are longer gaps before the final No. 22 appeared. Designed to inculcate
morality and satirize the follies of fashion, this series has already been
considered as part of the satiric tradition of the colonial South. Its several
sources and forms of wit and satire have been indicated, and the question
of its single or multiple authorship must remain unsettled. The essays do
differ considerably in form but have a unity of tone, argues one critic,
which would permit either sort of origin. Another critic concludes that
they are probably the work of a group of students at William and Mary.
If the latter be true, the authors almost surely received some critical advice
from their professors. The essays may seem too rough or naIve to have
been entirely the work of Oxford-educated faculty members, but they show
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