Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
William Waugh" (to be considered below ), and Miso-Ochlos' "Modern
Conversation" (May 16, 1751), admittedly a poorly written burlesque.
There were mock letters, burlesques of speeches, and many other forms
of humorous satire, most of them taken from British periodicals.S!
By July of 1751 the Reverend Samuel Davies was publishing his re­
ligious and nature and patriotic verse which brought upon himr at least
the religious poems did-the wrath and even invective and at least biting
satire of several critics, almost surely Anglican clergy, of whom the chief
signed himself Walter Dymocke, actually the Reverend John Robertson.
Davies' Miscellaneous Poems, which had appeared in January 1752, was
subjected between March 20 and June 12 of that year to a series of eight
lengthy attacks. These are a mixture of moderately sound criticism and
pure invective. Davies replied on July 3 and 10, and others wrote in support
of both parties. The matter was temporarily laid to rest on August 4
with an anonymous sardonic mock-elegy on the death of Walter Dymocke.
The satire in these exchanges is in prose and mock-heroic verse, with cari­
catures of profligate Anglicans and bigoted puritanical Presbyterians. Dy­
mocke's second and third pieces show some real wit, but in the succeeding
arguments he descends to vicious personal attacks.
Davies' replies are not actually satiric (when he wrote the mock­
elegy on Dymocke ), but at the last he defended himself vigorously on
strong critical grounds, at the same time admitting the justice of some of
Dymocke's remarks on his poetry. But he rightly accuses the Anglican of
achieving his humor at the expense of the dissenters in eastern Virginia.
Since he was held generally in high esteem as pulpit orator and poet by
most Anglicans and Presbyterians alike, the newspaper attacks on his work
at mid-century are significant as one of the rare examples of southern colo­
nial literary criticism rather well argued on both sides, one side at least
employing the mock-heroic and burlesque and invective to produce its
effects.s2
The poet's corner in the later issues of the Virginia Gazette included
verse of all kinds. For example, the occasional and humorous and meditative
pieces of Scot James Reid.s3 Reid's socio-religious satire, "The Religion
of the Bible and of K[ing] W[illiam] County Compared," an able and
biting attack on the pseudo-piety and morality and social arrogance of the
gentry of a Virginia county, is an effective prose satire which did not appear
in print at all until 1967, though parts of it have since been anthologized.
Reid, apparently a tutor in the Ruffin and Claiborne families, displays wide
reading and a real erudition in this book-length satire. In tone and shape
it is more nearly kin to Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Goldsmith's
Citizen of the World than to the gentle essays of Addison and Steele or the
ironic and savage tales of Swift, though it is not directly in the epistolarian
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