Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
others would have assured any Englishman that their authors were not
produced in his native country, though a few were born there and a few
more were educated in part in Britain.
There were other Virginia belletristic essayists who may or may not
have contributed to the Williamsburg newspapers. An elaborately aphoristic
sentimental essay of I764, "A Pathetic Soliloquy," by Robert Bolling
of Chellowe still reposes in manuscript in the Library of Congress.207 Two
pieces by gifted Sir William Gooch, printed in now-rare pamphlets, are
definitely utilitarian in aim but are also moral or meditative pieces, the one
on a legal question, the other concerned with the economics of the colony.
In his I730 A Charge to the Grand Jury. At a General Court, held in the
Capitol of the City of Williamsburg . .. printed by Parks, the governor
begins in the manner of a meditative essayist. Two years later, during a
heated controversy over tobacco sale and cultivation, Gooch as "a sincere
Lover of Virginia" had Parks print A Dialogue between Thomas Sweet­
Scented, William Oronoco, Planters, both Men of good Understanding, and
Justice Love-Country, who can speak for himself, recommended To the
Reading of the Planters. It is a defense of the Tobacco Law passed in May
I730, a spirited, lively, good-tempered dialogue between the small growers
of the two principal kinds of sotweed on the one hand and an able, patriotic
justice of the peace on the other. The justice argues that laws are never
made to oppress people, and if they turn out so they may be amended. It
is a well-informed, rational argument which one suspects was aimed to
bring over a majority of the "poor planters" who had opposed the act.
Rhetorically and linguistically beautifully expressed, its style in its colloquialisms
is easy and natural. Even the justice's final sententious speech, a
defense of colonial governmental procedure and a bit of advice to the small
farmer, is in clear, homely but dignified language.2os
Though the modern editor of An Essay upon the Government of the
English Plantations on the Continent of American (I70I) . . .
with Two
Memoranda by William Byrd was inclined to believe in I945 that William
Byrd II or his brother-in-law Robert Beverley the historian had at least a
hand in this essay-pamphlet, it has more recently been argued rather convincingly
to be the work of Ralph Wormeley, secretary of Virginia and
president of the Council and at the time of composition the foremost
gentleman besides the governor in the colony, or it may have been by
Benjamin Harrison III.209 Its original title page described it as "By an
American" who lets it be known he is a Virginian.
Though William Byrd II's briefer prose is by no means confined to the
purely belletristic, he probably composed more graceful essays artistically
motivated in subject and style than any other Virginian of the eighteenth
century. As his manuscripts continue to float up from unknown or forgot-
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