Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
Great George our Sovereign is our Friend,
Be thank full and forget thy Pain-
How has this infant Province shook:,
Under a lawless Tyrants Sway;
But lo! the iron Rod is broke,
Ellis is come to cheer our Day.275
Though both these governors were under the Crown, Reynolds' a utocratic
and military point of view as first royal administrator caused considerable
resentment from the already disillusioned colonists. The poems
(or at least the latter one ) were read at the wharf on the arrival of Governor
Ellis.
In I758 a Tombo-Chiqui,' or The American Savage. A Dramatic Entertainment,
probably by English playwright John Cleland (17°9-1789),
was published in London. The Library of Congress Catalogue says it is
a translation of a French work by Louis Franois La Drevetiere's Arlequin
Sauvage. It is another commemoration of the red man who had caught the
fancy of Britons when he visited their metropolis. Apparently colonial is
UA.Z:s" "Ode" sent to the newly inaugurated Georgia Gazette in 1763
and published in the issue of April 28. Addressed "To the Printer" and
avowedly written for those who were greatly dissatisfied with the preliminary
articles of peace signed at Fontainebleau, the poem is the first item in
a column headed "America. / Savannah, April 28." There are no local
references in the eleven quatrains, but it seems to be of Georgia origin.276
Though one may agree with J.A. Leo Lemay that more than half the
poems appearing in colonial periodicals were reprinted from British sources
usually without acknowledgment, there is still enough indigenous verse,
in our case southern, to warrant a survey of the periodical pieces and of the
volumes of poetry written partially or entirely by Americans. An edition
of Latin poetry in colonial America is now in preparation, for example, but
in the eighteenth-century newspaper or magazine before I764 there is
relatively little original verse in this ancient language though a great many
paraphrases and imitations and adaptations in English of specific ancient
poems or poets, including riddles, epigrams, eclogues, and satires. Yet there
are all sorts of evidences, including manuscripts, that poems were composed
in Latin, by schoolboys as exercises or by mature scholars, including
some professors, principally for their own amusement.
Though only a handful of genuinely impressive southern poets can be
named, men such as Lewis and Davies and Sterling and Bolling, there is
a remarkable variety of forms and genres of verse in the region. The satiric
and the elegiac are persistent and often distinctive and in a few rare cases
distinguished. Only during the golden age of the colonial South, the period
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