Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
ten sources, his reputation has steadily grown rather than diminished. Most
of his essays, from character sketch to religious creed, have at least been
noticed along with his satiric work. He was probably writing them before
1700, and certainly during the first decade of the eighteenth century in both
England and America. The language of preciosity and elaborate compliment
in some of his serious "characters" of the ladies is in the British tradition
of his time as much as his early occasional verse is. Many are outlined
in epistolary form, but those that are letters differ little in language and
subject from those without formal salutation or conclusion. Then there is
among Byrd's charming familiar essays "A Translation of that difficult
Passage of Plyny concerning the nightingale in the loth Book of His Natural
History," so free and brief that it may be considered an original
creation.210
North Carolina, which did not have a newspaper until mid-century, is
represented in print or manuscript by very few essays, though as earlier
chapters have indicated men of intellect and education were residing in
the colony from the beginning of the century. Among the few extant issues
of the North Carolina Gazette in the period 1751-1763 is "The Temple
of Hymen. A Vision" (November 15, 1751), a prose allegory perhaps
borrowed from a British journal. On March 6 (1752?) appeared "Reflections
on unhappy Marriages" (from internal evidence ) more likely to
have been of local origin. Governor Arthur Dobbs, perhaps the most literary
of this province's early governors, undoubtedly wrote some of his
voluminous meditative essays on religion, trade, and exploration during
his life in Carolina. His "Proclamation for a Fast" appeared in the North
Carolina Gazette of April 15, 1757, and others of his official speeches and
proclamations were printed in various provincial and British periodicals.
But most of his writing, including "An Account of North Carolina," has
been printed for the first time within the past century in the Colonial
Records of North Carolina, and long discourses such as the "Essay upon
the Grand Plan of Providence" remain as yet in manuscript.211 The best
contemporarily published essays from this colony appeared as separate
tracts between 1740 and 1770, most of them politico-economic, but including
Hermon Husband's Some Remarks on Religion (Philadelphia,
1761), a remarkable introspective and autobiographical essay.
South Carolina essays or pamphlets on religion, education, science, and
art, as well as the two periodical series of the "Meddler" and the "Humourist,"
have already been noted. There were many more single pieces, most
of them in the South-Carolina Gazette, some in British periodicals, and a
few as yet unprinted. Those published in the Charleston newspaper, like
the essays in the other southern journals, are strongly Addisonian or J ohnsonian
in form and subject with the occasional intrusion of a topic of vital
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