Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
on oyer and terminer courts. He at least began a history of Virginia which
possibly survives in abbreviated form at the beginning of his "History of
the Dividing Line." He was responsible for the German-language promotion
tract Neu-gefundenes Eden (1737) though he probably did not even
compile this material from the work of other men. His scientific observations
scattered through dozens of his letters, in one brief 1696 essay in the
Transactions of the Royal Society, and in A Discourse Concerning the
Plague (1721), of which more in a moment. His sincere religious belief
is spelled out in the "creed" written on the first several pages of his recently
discovered history of Christianity (now in the Virginia Historical Society).
His verse is not all satiric, as in his graceful tribute to Governor Spotswood's
attempt to educate and Christianize Indian tribes, or the acrostic (presumably
his ) on his daughter Evelyn printed in the Virginia Gazette.
Among the early miscellaneous pieces are a few which show the mind
of the congenital satirist at work. A Discourse Concerning the Plague, with
some Preservatives Against It, By a Lover of Mankind (London, 1721) is
ostensibly a learned treatise, larded with allusions to ancient and modern
medical practices, and proposing that the government (in Britain) take
specific precautions to prevent the spread of the disease. The principal antidote
proposed is tobacco. Since it has already been chewed, smoked, or
snuffed in every rank of society since 1665, the author notes, England has
been free of the plague. Further to insure this immunity, tobacco should
be worn on the person,hung in coaches and apartments, burned in dining
rooms, and chewed daily. Though the Discourse has been taken seriously
as a medicine-cum-tobacco promotion pamphlet, the mock-serious, sly,
deadpan, satiric irony of Swift's A Modest Proposal, or some of Franklin's
essays seems also to be here. It is difficult to believe that Byrd's contemporary
reader could take the author seriously, but then Swift and Franklin
were so taken by many.
Perhaps as early as his days at the Inns of Court, Byrd drew character
sketches of his friends, his enemies, and himself. He was following a
seventeenth-century tradition as well as a form popular among the Queen
Anne essayists. Many of the earlier English caricaturists and perhaps as
significantly Theophrastus, La Bruyere, and his own contemporaries Addison
and Steele were represented in his library. He uses several of the
same tag names they do for the ladies in his sketches or certain letters, and
there is good evidence that these tags were in every case mere appropriate
disguises for the names of real people.
His "characters" are panegyrics or sharp caricatures, though sometimes,
as in "Dr. Glisterio" (Dr. Samuel Garth, poet-physician), he strikes a
balance. He wrote favorably of his friends Sir Robert Southwell and the
Duke of Argyle, but the majority of his analyses are satirical. Byrd does
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