Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
sprightly and to mock men's manners, not to force enlistments or produce
a change in government. But these essays hardly equal in skill:
urbanity, or wit those of the colonial who wrote in 1753-1754 under
the pseudonym HThe Humourist." In his first essay of November 26,
1753, datelined from Hmy chambers in the Air," he begins by describing
himself as Ha Man of a peculiar odd way of Thinking." Launching into a
"Retrospect into past Times," he mentions with approval Sidney's Arcadia,
Spenser's Faerie Queene, and the eroticism of Restoration literature.
His own time, he declares, is overflowing with HNovel writing
without Reason, and Lies without meaning." In the next issue he describes
himself as possessing a small body and a great soul. He shows many interests,
from literature through morality.
"Humourist" is a perceptive and sophisticated literary observer. In his
essays he compares the ancients and the moderns, the character of contemporary
criticism, and the vogue of the folk ballad, the pastoral, and
the satire. Though mildly satiric at times, he shows himself a fair-minded
critic without real prejudices, and a learned and graceful penman. He
supplemented his prose with some rather decent verse. By mid-1754 he
announced that he was now such an invalid that he found it necessary to
retire, and so ends the series. His definition of the critic is interesting if
not unusual: "an Abstract of every Thing . .. always giving his Opinions,
as the true Standard whereby to direct the Judgment and inform the U nderstanding
of Mankind . .. [and] by Nature cruel." The last quality the
"Humourist" did not display. On the whole, his is the ablest belletristic
series to appear from a southern writer in the colonial period.20o
Single Familiar Essays
William Parks and Jonas Green in Maryland, Parks and William
Hunter and Joseph Royle in Virginia, and Lewis and Elizabeth and
Peter Timothy in South Carolina all used the British periodical essays of
their century as models, sometimes thinly disguising them and presenting
them to the public as original. They also published a considerable
number with proper acknowledgment of sources. Then there were prose
pieces similar to the British in form but very different in subject matter
and vocabulary, even sometimes in style, which set them apart as
American.
As suggested in the preceding section of this chapter, in diction and
even content the influence of the T atler and Spectator is pervasive through
the whole colonial era well into the nineteenth century. For political purposes
in both Chesapeake provinces and in South Carolina Trenchard and
Gordon's separate essays from Cato's Letters and the Independent Whig
were reprinted. Though as noticed in Chapter IV above these appeared
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