Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
for expulsion of the French from this continent, anticipating Jefferson's
motives and rationale half a century later for the Louisiana Purchase.
Twelve quatrains in octosyllabics, devout in tone, reflect Dobbs' personal
piety. The first and third stanzas are representative :
To God, our God's Almighty Name
Let Britons all their Voice raise,
And publish by the Mouth of fame
In Songs of Joy our Savior's Praise.
Then Christ our God commenced his Reign,
And o'er our Councils did preside,
Did o'er our Fleets and Armies deign
To rule, and all their Actions guide.259
About the same time Dobbs was composing in North Carolina, Philadel­
phia poet Thomas Godfrey (I736-I763 ) moved to Wilmington in the
colony for business reasons and was to die and be buried there. Among
his Juvenile Poems on Various Subjects. With the Prince of Parthia, A
Tragedy (Philadelphia, I765 ) are several poems written in North Carolina.
Characteristic of his work in this period is a six-stanza piece about
Masonborough's grove, in which nymphs and swains are to gambol in its
"sylvan shade." Myra, Chloe, Cynthia are among the pastoral or mythological
ladies whose presence is noticed. He wrote other verse about the
coastal country, all of it conventional. His most ambitious southern poem
was on "The glorious success of his rna jesty's arms at Quebec," I94 lines
in the South-Carolina Gazette of November I7 and 24 and December 22,
I759, and reprinted all in one issue July I2, I760.260
Walser mentions a Scot in the Cape Fear region who in I774 composed
a Gaelic lullaby ("Duanag Altrium" ) which about parallels in time
Goronwy Owen's Welsh verse. Walser also mentions a schoolmaster,
Rednap Howell, who during the War of the Regulation composed a number
of ballads satirizing British officialdom in the colony. In the South­
Carolina Gazette of May 3, I760, the Reverend Michael Smith (mentioned
in Chapter VI for a printed sermon ) published I65 patriotic lines
"On the Reduction of Guadaloupe." Technically satisfactory are the coup­
lets beginning "Long had Despair approach'd Britannia's Shore, / And
things the Face of Dissolution Wore." 261
The North-Carolina Gazette, of which the earliest extant issue is number
I5 of November I 5, I 7 5 I, carried during the colonial period very
little verse, if one may judge generally by the few surviving issues. "Hymn
to the Supreme," perhaps a borrowed poem (of eighty-eight lines ) printed
on July 7, I753, is conventionally devout:
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