Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
Perhaps the ablest of southern belletrists as we know them today was
William Byrd II (1674-1744) of Westover along the James. His major
works, including both his works on the history of the Dividing Line, his
"Progress to the Mines" and ttJ ourney to the Land of Eden," as well as many
of his letters, "characters," diaries, and verses are comic or satiric in intent
and in tone. Spending about half his allotted years in Britain and Europe,
he is intellectually and literarily a son of his age, a Queen Anne wit and
early exemplar of the Enlightenment. But his best writing artistically is concerned
with his life in the Chesapeake country and the people he knew
there.
Though some of Byrd's entirely serious writing, along with other aspects
of those pieces touched with the comic, are noted elsewhere, he was first and
last a satirist, ranging in his expression from the gently sardonic or ironic
to moderately biting personal and social ridicule. He was by no means the
isolated phenomenon or (botanically) the "sport" or deviate from the
southern colonial norm he has frequently been made out to be. He kept
diaries as did Landon Carter and letter books as did his father, William
Byrd I, and William Fitzhugh, wrote character sketches personal and
typical as did his contemporaries in the Maryland, Virginia, and South
Carolina Gazettes, and like these contemporaries composed and enjoyed
the sexual or scatological innuendo. His personal interests in land and
red men and tobacco and books, plants and law, remind us of the same
qualities in his brothers-in-law John Custis and Robert Beverley II, his
friends Sir John Randolph and Mark Catesby and Ralph Wormeley and
several Harrisons, and his acquaintances John Mercer, Benjamin Waller,
Alexander Spotswood, Richard Bland, William Stith, and even Commissary
J ames Blair, among a host of other colonials. During his final two decades
spent at home in Virginia he missed his English friends of Queen Anne's
or Georgian London, but the correspondence he kept up with them, from
officers of the Royal Society and dukes and earls to merchant factors and
relatives, reveal that he felt at home, perhaps at peace, in his pastoral
American environment, for he wrote of it with a humorously affectionate
disparagement which pictured it as he saw it was. He continued occasionally
to long for the fleshpots of Egypt, and it was perhaps this longing and
his previous intimate personal acquaintances with the witty and gay society
of early eighteenth-century London which enabled him to delineate his
native land with so much good-natured irony.
Byrd's miscellaneous minor writings began before the seventeenth century
was quite out. They included legal arguments and essays defending
Governor Andros before the mature ecclesiastics at Lambeth in 1697, arguments
against "Proprietary Governments," and a brief address (in 1718)