Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH ' Dated from Charleston was a brief meditation on the ebb and flow of fortune in the July 16, 1787, issue, followed on July 30 with " On a Good Conscience." On July 6, 1738, "Philomusus" had printed five stanzas on contentment. "The Golden Age" is considered in forty lines on May 26, 1746. And perhaps borrowed is Hlife. An Ode" in the February 8, 1748, issue: Life! the dear precious boon. Soon we lose, alas! how soon! Fleeting vision, falsely gay! Grasp'd in vain, it fades away, Mixing with surrounding shades; Lovely vision! how it fades! Let the Muse, in Fancy's glass, Catch the phantoms as they pass. There were also poems on scientific subjects, such as the three of 1760 that concern the smallpox. Two excerpts from a poem entitled "Indico," which was to be printed by subscription, were printed in the August 25, 1757, and December I, 1758, Gazettes, though evidence that the whole poem was ever published has not been found. It is an agricultural didactic piece in the tradition of Hesiod and Virgil which had again become popular in this eighteenth.century neoclassical age. It was to be the centerpiece of a collection of verse probably by Charles W oodmason. John Dyer's The Fleece (1757) and James Grainger's The Sugar. Cane (1764) were of the same period and genre. The first excerpt begins in the heroic form: The Means and Arts that to Perfection bring, The richer Dye of INDICO, I sing. Kind Heav'n! whose wise and provIdential Care Has granted us another World to share, These happy Climes to Antients quite unknown, And fields more fruitful than Britannia's own. Technical details follow, in rather pedestrian couplets, though the descrip. tions are of considerable interest.271 One of the better poets residing in South Carolina was the Rowland Rugeley considered above as a satirist, a man who published his one booklength American poem, The Story of .!Eneas and Dido Burlesqued in Charleston in 1774. Before he came to South Carolina about 1765 he had published in British periodicals and in 1763 Miscellaneous Poems and Trans lations (Cambridge, England) also already noted for its satiric con· tent. Yet his 1763 volume also contains "An Ode to Contentment," as moral and reflective as any verse appearing in the colonial gazettes of the period. Lyrics to ladies, paraphrases of Horace, philosophic meditations,
· Literature, Principally Belletristic . pastoral dialogues, occasional poems, are among the variety he produced. He also surely contributed to the South-Carolina Gazette and the South Carolina and American General Magazine and perhaps other colonial periodicals during his stay (until the end of his life ) in the colony. Al though Rugeley's brother Henry was a well-known Tory, all that at present is known of the poet personally is that he seems to have married a daughter of a Reverend William Dawson (perhaps of Virginia ) and with his wife and child died in 1776, and that he was known in the colonies as in Britain as a man of letters and of integrity and a facetious companion. Investigation should reveal more of his Carolina verse of the decade 1765-1776.272 A considerable number of poems about Georgia and its founder, James Oglethorpe, were written and published in England before and during the period of first settlement. Many, perhaps most, are promotion pieces, but there were several personal eulogies or complimentary poems on General Oglethorpe, which should be considered as part of the first literature of this younger colony in much the same way that the pre-Roanoke Island voyagers and Hakluyt and even Purchas wrote of the upper southern area before it was settled. "Georgia and Carolina" appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine of February 1733 (III, 94), "While, yet, Unripe, the flowing Purpose lay. / And conscious Silence plann'd its op'ning Way." In the same journal in April (III, 209 ) was among the first of many of its kind, "An Address to James Oglethorpe, Esq; on his settling the Colony in Georgia," verse which had already been printed in the South-Carolina Gazette of February 10, 1733,273 and just possibly may be colonial in origin. In the Gentleman's Magazine of September 1734 was "To the honourable James Oglethorpe, Esq, On his Return from Georgia." After the General had recruited funds, supplies, and colonists during 1735, in January 1736 he set forth again. "A Copy of Verses on Mr. Oglethorpe's Second Voyage to Georgia" may have been written in late 1735 to speed him on his way. Not very distinguished verse, it does contain specific allusions to pine forests, grapevines, and silk culture, concluding that with Oglethorpe "Another Britain in the Desart [will} rise!" This and two other "Georgia" poems of 1736 have been attributed to Samuel Wesley the younger, but a recent editor has argued on good grounds that they are more likely the work of the Reverend Thomas Fitzgerald (1695- 1752), an amateur literary man of varied accomplishments. Printed in March 1736 in handsome folio with A Copy of Verses were "Georgia, A Poem" and "Torno Chachi, An Ode." "Georgia," the first poem in the book (the titles of all three poems are included on the title page) contains the usual arguments favorable to the establishment of the colony, with the old plea to utilize the potential Eden: 1503
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Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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