Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH ·
lament for Bacon. No two critics have ever agreed completely on the purpose
of either or both poems, but all do agree that rhetorical symmetry of
structure marks both, and irony at least the second of the twO.67
One other attempt at literary satire before 1700 is worth noting,
though its subject and object can only be guessed at. The record of the
Virginia General Assembly of May 31, 1699, contains the testimony of
a witness that the Reverend Mr. Samuel Gray, as Anglican parson of
Middlesex County, had in his possession and circulated scandalous verses
in dialogue form. Gray declared that they were put into his pocket by
"some Idle Rascal or other at Towne, and that as he come from Towne he
saw a Letter in the road directed to Mr. Speaker." Gray admitted later that
he was the author of this "very Scandalous and Libellous Paper ... very
reflective upon the Government" and ultimately was pardoned by the governor
and Council.
It is the event itself which is of interest. From the later records of plays
found in courtyards, Byrd's mention in his diary of throwing verse lampoons
into the House of Burgesses, and the "Dinwiddianaeu poems (to be
noted below ), it is clear from this item and hints of others that there was
before the end of the seventeenth century a fairly well established tradition
of political and social criticism in verse, probably doggerel but not necessarily
so, circulated in manuscript by hand. Thus there is some direct evidence
and a good deal more indirect suggestion from reading between the
lines of records of the General Assembly that satire aimed at reform, public
verse and even crude drama and dialogue, was a long-established tradition
in colonial Virginia, probably reaching back at latest to the closing years
of the seventeenth century. One should note that Cotton claims that the
two elegies on Bacon were among the political poems floating around the
colony at the time. Judging by the political pamphleteering in Maryland in
the 1650S, there was probably a similar situation this early in that colony.
From the uDinwiddianae" manuscripts of the I 7 50S to the political verse
and prose satires of Landon Carter and Richard Hewitt and Thomas Burke
and Richard Bland on one side and John Camm and possibly James Maury
on the other was but a step. And the flimsy pretense of "finding" a manuscript,
as that of Reverened Mr. Menzies in 1759, which cast satiric aspersions
on government, looked back to Gray and Byrd and forward to the
political satiric plays of Robert Munford.68
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HUMOR , SATIRE , AND DIALECf WRITING
The clergy in Virginia especially, and to some extent in Maryland and
South Carolina, continued down to the Revolution to speak their minds
through written satire as well as in the pulpit. The running fight between
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