Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
a lively inventiveness and almost urbane wit which makes adolescent
authorship doubtful. The public clearly enjoyed these essays, incidentally,
especially the mock debates between the Monitor and his severe critic
ZoilUS.195
Not all the "Monitor" pieces are satiric. No. 10 is on "Musick and
Harmony," No. I I on the press as an auxiliary of the pulpit. Later ones
do seem to become increasingly tongue-in-cheek or bitingly ironic. At any
rate, they seem to be the most original group of essays in the first thirty
years of the Virginia Gazette's history.196
In a sense the Davies-Dymocke literary controversy of 1752 is also an
essay series, but it has been discussed frequently in several earlier contexts,
such as the satiric. It is beneath the surface, at least in part, a serious discussion
of critical standards and literary tastes. Dymocke is usually sound
in his taste but so bent on humiliating that he takes lines or images unfairly
out of context. Davies is conscious of his own weaknesses and
freely admits them but replies sharply where Dymocke is unfair. All together
the exchange represents educated men debating aesthetic principles,
fairly or unfairly, in the columns of this little newspaper in a southern
colony.
Perhaps the most intriguing and even best-written of Virginia essay
series is the 1756-1757 "Centinel" group, of which only No. X now
survives in a known issue of the Gazette, that of September 3, 1756.
Fortunately numbers I, II ( ? ), III, IX, XI, XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX
were reprinted in issues of the New York Gazette (six), the Maryland
Gazette (one or two ), the New Hampshire Gazette (two), the Boston
Evening Post (four), and the Pennsylvania Gazette (one). No. X, which
Worthington C. Ford saw as an attack on George Washington, has been
discussed in at least one critical essay, and J.A. leo lemay, who once believed
he had evidence pointing to the Reverend James Maury as author
of this and at least some others in the series, has on reconsideration and
some new evidence come to the conclusion that the Centinel papers were
written not by the Anglican parson, but by the Presbyterian Samuel
Davies.197 Prose rhetoric and poetic imagery have some resemblance to
Davies', and Lemay finds that in Centinel No. XIX, extant in the Boston
Evening Post of April II, 1757, references to and quotations from a
"Manuscript Sermon" can be positively identified as the sermon Davies
preached at Henrico January I, 1757. Both X and XIX are apparently
attacks on the soldiers fighting against the French. Lemay analyzes the
group of essays as a whole for reasoning, argument, language, and imagery,
and above all rhetorical style. He concludes that Davies was at
least the principal, if not the sale, author of the series. This writer is not
entirely convinced, for a number of educated men might have seen