Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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· 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 1362
· Literature, Principally Belletristic . written by the Reverend Samuel Wesley and had already appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette. It is long and somewhat tedious, and in this instance the ribald quality is minimal. On September 6, 1735, appeared fourteen lines on "A Duel of Dunghill Soldiery," perhaps by one of the Meddler's Club, of which more later. Two burlesque poems on the rhymed advertisement of a James Reid were printed on November 2, 1738, and November 20, 1752. Reid in his own verse, after mentioning various merchandise he had imported, pleads: "Have Mercy Criticks! For I am no Poet. / I've Goods to sell, and wish you all should Know it." By 1740 the Whitefield controversy was under way in verse and prose. On May 24 of that year appeared a spirited Hudibrastic poem in the South Carolina Gazette denouncing Whitefield, his "enthusiastic" supporters, and the Bethesda Orphan House. It begins "St. Anthony had but one Pig, / N'er cogg'd a Dye, nor frisked a Jig" and proceeds into a strong attack in effective verse, a long poem of 122 lines. On June 7 a reply shows how seriously the Whitefieldeans took themselves, but it is moderately effective satire. There were others pro and con on June 26, July 18, July 25, and August 8 and 23. And the last shot in the metrical battle was fired in the issue of November 12, when thirty-four lines by "Homme-Rouge," "wrote when the Whitefieldean Farce was at its Height in Charles-Town," were printed. The anti-Whitefieldean verse is on the whole better rhyme than that supporting the evangelist. Much of the mocking prose usually takes the form of letters attached to the verses submitted.75 The principal satire of the earlier period, however, was in the Meddler's Club essays of 1735. This is the earlier of two interesting and significant essay series which appeared in the Charleston newspaper before the Revolution. Throughout the Gazette's history, the Addisonian Spectator essays were quoted, referred to, or imitated, as they were in British newspapers and magazines throughout the same period and later. One issue of 1732 (January 29) has a local "Publicola" chide the editor for the cruelty of his satiric expressions and quotes the Spectator as to the true nature (function?) of satire and censure, and other issues contain extracts or complete essays from the popular British journal which are characterized by gentle humor or mannerly satire. In 1735 the Meddler's Club contributed a series of lively essays on the Addisonian model. On August 16 appeared their introductory piece, which explained that the six personae would "meddle" only with the general business, not with the personal. They had tag names (with explanations of the meaning of each) such as Jack-would-be-Taller, Dick Haughty, Will Generous, Ralph Hippo, Tom Snigger, and Bob Careless, really parodies of the club-names in the Spectator group. There are discussions of such characteristically local foibles as ladies' promenading along the waterfront, suggested by Dick Haughty 1363
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Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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