Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
by an unpopular governor who had been bitingly attacked in a series of
manuscript Hudibrastic verses and dialect burlesque epistles which may
have been written by a group of men largely for their own amusement.
The tracts-for-the-times of the 1750S and 1760s composed throughout
the colonies but at their artistic and critical best in the Chesapeake area,
though often published in both colonial capitals and London and Edinburgh,
were usually aimed at American readers.
The southern sermons already considered which will soon appear in
print or reprint, one hopes, in considerable numbers, from Hawte Wyatt
and Deuel Pead and other preachers of early Jamestown to the betterknown
pulpit orators of eighteenth-century Annapolis and Williamsburg
and Charleston, were directed at local parochial congregations. Yet several
dozen preachers survive in print and at least two in multivolumed collections
in more than one edition. Of the last, James Blair avowed that he
addressed his local congregation, and the reader of his down-to-earth Anglican
homilies will agree that they seem peculiarily suited to the mixed society
of the colony which listened to them, though at the same time one recalls
that they were apparently widely read in Britain. The sermons of Samuel
Davies, the other frequently published preacher, despite their appeal over
a full century on both sides of the Atlantic, were clearly addressed to
Virginia Presbyterians or to the colony's unchurched. They are as American
as the Puritan sermons of Jonathan Edwards, and perhaps more American
than the earlier preaching of Samuel Shepard and Edward Taylor.
Neither Blair nor Davies nor their contemporaries Thomas Cradock and
Samuel Quincy use the baroque imagery of the earlier New Englanders, but
their romantic or pre-Romantic and sublime imagery compares with that of
their ablest New England contemporaries and springs perhaps from similar
sources. And the rolling cadences, the alliteration, the antitheses of Davies'
pulpit oratory are at once part of his age and the Great Awakening and of
the mind and spirit of this native-born American himself. Into the southern
sermon have gone the flowers of rhetoric, the language of poetry, and in
the instance of Davies as of Edward Taylor, verse itself. In a sense Taylor's
verse is sui generis, but Davies' springs straight from the soil of the Great
Awakening as that movement manifested itself in the South. It is a part
of colonial homiletic writing and of a body of religious poetry which was
itself a part of southern belles lettres.
The largest body of southern prose, the official legislative and executive
and judicial, is of course purposeful. But as already noted, governors' addresses
to Indian chiefs at treaty times are, at least as they are recorded,
conscious art influenced by aboriginal forms and images in oral discourse.
The charges to juries of governors or chief justices were at times philosophical
essays, and the epistolary reports of officers of the Crown to the
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