Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
These are signed, or some of them are, by "Mr. Burrard," whose identity
with the master of Westover has been held in some doubt by certain critics,
though Dolmetsch's recent researches have shown them to be his. Byrd's
turn-of-the-century pieces are in alternately rhyming quatrains, his 1719
verse in the couplets so dear to the eighteenth-century rhymster. Yet all
his poetry is in tone, imagery, and form much closer to late seventeenthcentury
English verse than to that most popular after the first decade or
quarter of the new century. "On the Dutchess of Montagu" is characteristic :
In vain Prometheus had contriv'd the Plan
Had Heav'n refus'd to animate the Man:
So Fancy forms, ... but Life must you inspire;
For strong's the Force of your diffusive Fire.
Oh! wert thou added to the heavenly Three,
And Paris once again was to decree;
In vain to him the Goddesses would sue,
The prize in Justice would be due to you.
What may have been one of Byrd's contributions to The Careless Husband,
allegedly written by him and two British noblemen and not by Colley Cibber,
is the four-quatrain "A Song," beginning
Sabina with an Angel's face
By Love ordain'd for Joy,
Seems of the Syren's cruel Race,
To Charm and then destroy.234
And recently printed from a manuscript among the St. George Tucker
Papers at Williamsburg is a poem, "By the first Col. Byrd [i.e., William II]
and communicated by David Mead Esq.r." This is "An humble address to
Cupid," which concerns the poet's love for "Lucinda" when he has reached
"serious years." In a sense antithetical to mature Nicholson's pleas, it is a
graceful piece of seventeen lines.235
Probably a frequent anonymous or pseudonymous contributor to the
Virginia Gazette and certainly occasionally printed or reprinted in British
periodicals was William Dawson (1704-1752), professor and then president
of the College of William and Mary. M.A. of Queen's College, Oxford,
and D.D. by diploma, he married the sister of historian William
Stith. Soon after the Virginia Gazette began, there appeared in the issue of
October 22, 1736, an advertisement of Poems on Several Occasions By a
Gentleman of Virginia, the first volume of verse known to have been published
in the colony (though subscriptions had been solicited for an earlier
Virginia Miscellany . .. By Several Gentlemen of this Colony in 1731 in
the American Weekly Mercury of Philadelphia ). The Poems on Several
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