Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally BeUetristic .
of evil and human depravity. For he is a southern puritan, not Puritan,
as was also Alexander Whitaker in the first generation of southern
colonists and as are dozens of the area's writers in the twentieth century.
He expressed himself in the accepted forms of his neoclassical age-the
periodical essay, the long prose satire, and the religious, occasional, and
satiric poem.252
Besides these amatory lyrics and religious and meditative poems several
other varieties are represented in eighteenth-century Virginia, especially in
the Gazette. Patriotic verse had been composed sporadically since the seventeenth
century. Davies, for example, probably wrote the lines appearing
in the Scot's Magazine (XVII [October 1735), 488 ), "Verses on Gen.
Braddock's Defeat," which was reprinted several times in American newspapers.253
Richard Bland's "An Epistle to Landon Carter," urging the latter
to stand for the House of Burgesses, is certainly a patriotic poem.254 Dozens
appeared after 1763, a few of which have been mentioned in connection
with poets who also wrote before that date. Only one interesting piece,
"The Stamp Act Repeal" by Dr. Thomas Burke written for a celebration
of this event at Northampton County courthouse on the Eastern Shore,
can here be noticed. Part of it was edited by Richard Walser quite recently,
but the whole poem appears in Frank Moore's Songs and Ballads of the
American Revolution (New York, 1855) along with many other later
controversial southern poems of the decade before the Declaration of Independence.
A few earlier narratives and ballads from the 1740S appeared
in the Virginia Gazette or London Magazine or General Magazine, from
the scatological to the 1751 "A New Ballad on the British Herring Fishery,"
none of particular intrinsic or historical interest. Occasional poems
include prologues and epilogues for plays (see Chapter VIII) and a variety
of songs by Edward Kimber published in the London Magazine in the
1740S concerning episodes in his colonial tour, and a few others of some
significance.
Perhaps the most interesting historically, and not bad in form, is the "Expeditio
Ultramontana," the celebration of Spotswood's western expedition
translated from the Latin of Arthur Blackamore by his old Oxonian friend
the Reverend George Seagood and published in the Maryland Gazette
of June 24, 1729 (before there was a Virginia Gazette) . Topographical
as well as occasional, its couplets carry descriptions of the countryside
through which the expedition journeyed. The form is roughly epic, announcing
the heroic nature of the event and following the protagonist,
Spotswood, to and from his destination across the mountains, comparing
him in the last couplet with Hercules, who "Had made two Mountains,
Pillars of his Praise." The Latin poem must have for some years been
circulated in Virginia, for published in the Southern Literary Messenger