Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· 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:
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