Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
but carried to punning and satiric and leering laughter by other members
of the group of Carolina writers. The sexual innuendos apparently gave
offense, and the series was abandoned after several printed communications
denouncing the essays as having sprung from "a boozy bottle." But there
continued to be mildly burlesque essays on Spectator-Tatler or Rambler
models as well as on other British politically satiric models. A little local
linguistic usage and direct or indirect depictions of the Charleston scene
were genuinely American, good examples of the familiar essay so popular
in both Britain and the other colonies long past the Revolution.76
In the same period, 1730-1744, the newspapers of both Virginia and
Maryland, at least in surviving issues, contained humor and satire in varied
forms, some lifted straight from British periodicals but much of local
origin. And before 1745 at least one of the South's two ablest colonial
satirists was composing his greatest work. The Maryland Gazette, founded
by William Parks in 1727, in its extant numbers indicates that the satiric
tradition, even not considering Cook or Lewis, was very much alive in
that colony. Though the "Plain-Dealer" series begun in 1729 is not humorous
or satiric in method or aim, scattered essays and poems are. One of
Parks' more amusing borrowings is a story accompanying a mock-heroic
scatological poem "The Tale of the T[ur]d," taken from Sheridan and
Swift's Dublin newspaper the Intelligencer (March 11, 1728/9) . Humorous
but hardly satiric are the "Verses on St. Patrick's Day: Sacred to
Mirth and Good-Nature" in the issue of March 17, 1729/30, signed
"Somerset English," undoubtedly a local production. But what remains of
Parks' Maryland Gazette does not indicate that he carried in quantity
or quality the humorous materials to be found in the newspaper of his
successor, Jonas Green, or in his own Virginia Gazette founded in 1736.
The Williamsburg Virginia Gazette, inaugurated in August 1736, began
with an essay series designedly satiric, intended to inculcate morality
and criticize the follies of fashion. The great influences on the "Monitor"
series were the T atler and Spectator-in general topics, devices, genres,
even format. The Williamsburg writer or writers employed numberedessay
serial form as did the Spectator, Latin mOttos, and (in a few essays)
single-letter signatures. In No. 6, the earliest extant, the Monitor tells how
a strange female figure entered his study and presented to him her six
daughters as potential reporters for the newspaper : Miss Leer, Miss Sly,
Miss Fidget, Miss Amoret, Miss Phillis, and Miss Euphemia. Each professes
to be a specialist in some element of local life and society. Inherent in this
introduction to the young women is the rather obvious bawdy doubleentendre
of the speaker, for the mother is a procuress offering sexual
services. Puns, erotic metaphors, the euphemism of the Monitor's long
nose (which he wishes to show Euphemia) recall Tristram Shandy and
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