Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTU AL LIFE IN THE COLON IAL SOUTH '
men like William Fitzhugh and Landon Carter or even Thomas Jefferson.
But for the master of Westover deviations from the middle way, whether
by pompous Carolina commissioners, lawless denizens of the boundary
line, or by the saints of New England, were droll. For a talent nurtured in
Queen Anne's London incongruities must be shaped into congruity, or
order, by the mightiest of weapons, wit. His observant eye caught every­
thing in Williamsburg or Westover or the wilderness, and he usually found
it out of proportion. He was quite aware that he was laughing at himself
as he laughed at things around him in Virginia. His mood and his intention
sprang from his rationalism.
Like other satiric artists, he united usefulness with his wit. nThe History"
is at once promotion pamphlet, a New World natural history, and a
comedy. Byrd was modest and, despite his satire or perhaps through it,
tolerant. One could wish him less modest, both in the histories and in the
diaries, in depicting or in caricaturing the now blurred figures from his
London or American past. And he was a perfectionist, resolved never to let
anything get from his hands to the printer's unless it was to his sense com
pleted. Thus the charm of his best work did not become a part of Ameri
can literature until generations after his death. But he did look with
perceptive curiosity and sympathy at all kinds of fellow Americans. His
writings show that, more than did the Massachusetts theologians, he pro­
jected the future United States, not as a city set upon a hill, but as a happy
valley of plenty and a beehive of fruitful industry--despite the natural and
acquired indolence of some of its inhabitants.8o
Byrd and other talented Virginians contributed to the Virginia Gazette
before its first publisher William Parks died on a voyage to England in
1750. Much of their work is yet to be identified. But the best of the southern
colonial periodical literature appeared in the Virginia Gazette under
William Hunter and Joseph Royle and later printer-editors after 1750, in
the Maryland Gazette under Jonas Green and his family from 1746 to the
late 1760s, and in the South-Carolina Gazette under the Timothys from
the late 1730S to the Revolution. The notable group frequenting Williams­
burg in the latter days of Byrd, some of whom lived on into the 1760s and
early 1770s, included literarily gifted men, several of whom carried on the
humorous and satiric tradition, though never quite with the urbanity and
beautiful irony Byrd showed in the pieces he did not publish in the pro­
vincial newspaper.
Many of these printed pieces demonstrate the uses of the satiric. In the
Virginia Gazette of March 7, 1750/1, for example, appeared a dreadful
burlesque of part of Book I of Homer's Iliad. There were humorous poems
on physicians' love of worms (March 20, 1750/ I ), the mock "Epitaph on
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