Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
ability as articulate scholar, jurist, and thinker. Although at least some of
these have been referred to in previous chapters, they are so definitely su
perior as philosophic essays that they should be mentioned here. The "Eight
Charges Delivered . .. in the Years 1703. 1704. 1705. 1706. 1707." in a
beautiful manuscript in the Charleston Library Society is now being edited
for publication. In separate "charges" Trott examines the nature and origin
of law, its necessity and usefulness, the happiness of living under law, the
obligation to obey civil laws, the nature and obligation of oaths, the grand
juror's oath, and the excellency and reasonableness of the laws of England,
and concludes with an exhortation to enforce these laws against all offenders.
One of its most interesting features is the vindication of the belief
in witches, part of an extensive charge on witchcraft law, discussed primarily
in Chapter X. Jefferson's friend Dr. Thomas Cooper, himself a
juridical scholar, was two generations later to call Trott's discussion "undoubtedly
the most learned and elaborate defence of the existence of witchcraft
as a crime, that I have had the opportunity of perusing." Trott's
sentencing speeches for other crimes indicate even more clearly his literary
gift of lucid, learned, and lively prose. Here is the early-eighteenth-century
juridical mind at its philosophical and communicative best. Trott, like the
later Dobbs of North Carolina, demonstrates that the most perceptive of
southern minds could be at the same time deeply religious as well as rational
and political or juridica1.212
Literary or Aesthetic Criticism
All specifically literary criticism of the colonial South was written in the
eighteenth century, and in one place or another it has already been noticed.
Dramatic criticism has been considered briefly-for there is little of itearlier.
But perhaps it would be well at this point to bring together or re
call some of the scattered examples of aesthetic theory composed or printed
in the southern colonies before 1764. Again it all comes from Maryland,
Virginia, and South Carolina.
In discussions of Maryland it has been pointed out that long before he
came to that province Alexander Malcolm had published in Britain a
treatise on music which was a standard work for the English-speaking
world of the time. His Tuesday Club sobriquet of "Philo-Dogmaticus" possibly
suggests that he was also a general aesthetic critic. Dr. Alexander
Hamilton in his "History" of the Tuesday Club, his Itinerarium, and his
dream-essay in the Maryland Gazette of June 29, 1748, discussed above
was (in surviving or known literary evidence ) the most persistent and
perceptive of this group of amateur critics, though Jonas Green may have
been just as acute. And there is implicit aesthetic criticism in such satire