Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
recorded along with speculation as to their portent, were apparently taken
seriously. But if one keeps in mind the age and Byrd's other writings he
cannot be sure that the diarist is not smiling as he describes the figments of
his subconscious.
Byrd's letters compare favorably in literary quality with those of his
greatest British contemporaries, and among colonial American epistolarians
he must be given very high rank. The letters are a necessary complement
to and gloss upon his other writings, especially the diaries. Most
of them undated, many follow the literary conventions of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. They are usually to ladies, sometimes
mere frames for character sketches, sometimes playfully flirtatious, sometimes
sharply satirical, mocking, semi-serious, or serious, though even in
the last with sardonic overtones. The epistolary courtship of UFacetia" by
"Veramour" (Byrd in his youth ) is a series of pleadings interspaced with
the malicious or droll gossip of the town. In his middle age the epistolary
wooing of "Sabina" reveals a seriocomic situation worthy of being turned
into a sentimental comedy by one of his numerous playwright friends-if
Byrd himself lacked sufficient detachment to undertake it. From 1701
until just before his death, he wrote witty, informative, whimsical letters on
many subjects besides love and gallantry.
In them he frequently jeers at the saints of New England, the canting
hypocrites who sell Kill-Devil rum and are principal movers in the fiendish
slave trade. He shows the same anti-New England quality frequently in
the Dividing Line "Histories." To Sir Robert Walpole or to his librarian
at Westover or to a penniless fellow Virginian in London, Byrd writes with
graceful phrase and witty anecdote. So frequently does he write tongue-incheek
that the unwary must read carefully. One letter contains a tale/sketch
of a lady and a parson in a mail coach that might well match a Hogarthian
print. The devastating irony of his letter to John Fox upon receipt of a
volume of trifling verse which Fox had without permission dedicated to
him is worthy of comparison with Dr. johnson's classic reply to the Earl
of Chesterfield. The playful irony of his "Most hypochondriac Sir" reply
to librarian Proctor's complaint about firewood and candles is as unanswerable
as his letter to Fox.
Byrd's four best-known writings, "The Secret History of the Dividing
Line," "The History of the Dividing Line," "A Progress to the Mines," and
"A Journey to the Land of Eden," appeared together for the first time as
recently as 1966. This edition, based on the original "Westover Manuscripts,"
the one manuscript of "The Secret History" in the American
Philosophical Society, and a few odd pages to fill lacunae, is still not an
entirely textually satisfactory publication of these prose travel accounts.
But the four taken together, or as a unit, form the first classic work by a