Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
can spare, / A bare Subsistence claims our utmost Care." This mock-epic is
in itself one of the better translations of Holdsworth's popular poem. The
annotations indicate that the English versifier was familiar with, and probably
had access to, the works of classical antiquity and of such contemporaries
as Denham, Dryden, Addison, Parnell, and Pope.
In several ways the work is significant for and in early American
literature. It is in the mock-epic tradition to be employed many times in
the long history of satire in America. It indirectly celebrates an American
and southern minority, the Welsh. The dedication to Calvert links both
British literature generally and British satire to the New World and shows
the conscious need of developing belles lettres in a land still devoting its
principal energies to growing. More than Sandys' Ovid translated in Virginia,
it is professedly a contribution toward a New World literature.73
Before turning to mid-eighteenth-century southern colonial satire, one
should glance at a few expressions in the form in other colonies of the
period of Cook and Lewis in Maryland. Perhaps the earliest example of
French poetry written within the bounds of the present United States is a
South Carolina brief humorous burlesque poem written about 1706 by
a Huguenot refugee. The poet in nine lines has the governor declaring to
the officers of the combined French and Spanish fleet why he cannot surrender
Charleston.74 Then there are the satiric or ironic prose or poetic
pieces in the South-Carolina Gazette of the 1732-1744 period.
These compositions show considerable variety. "The Cameleon lover"
(March II, 1732, anonymous ) in verse attacks miscegenation and those
whites attracted by "the Blackness of their Charmer's Skin" and "The
Cameleon's Defence" (March 18, 1732, by "Sable" ) may be a tonguein-cheek
reply, for its appeal for "Love" as "the Monarch Passion of
the Mind" seems strongly sardonic. On April 22 of the same year appeared
"Ralpho Cobble's" "learning, that Cobweb of the Brain," a twentysix
line poem accompanied by a burlesque dialect letter. The epistle is in
a simulated illiterate rustic brogue, which may be an attempt to reproduce
Scotch, Scotch-Irish, or Irish dialect. The verse itself is in good English
and obviously ironic. On October 19, 1734, "The Petition of some of the
Province of G[eorgia}, to the P[rovince} of SC[arolina} SHEWETH • . • "
is a Carolina satiric metrical piece on the neighboring new colonists in
Georgia, many of whom seemed at least in the writer's opinion, like the
early Virginians of Smith's accounts, disenclined to work for a living. On
May 17, 1735, appeared another kind of humorous, mildly satiric narrative
poem with some ribald or bawdy innuendos or outright obscene language.
This particular one is a "mery tale" of a grumpy gentleman who dreamed
he swallowed a "merry cobbler" and had to have a vomit. It was supposedly
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