Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
form. Reid writes in a puritan strain which has remained (see Chapters V
and VI ) one element of the southern inheritance and tradition. He sees in
Virginia rural society just before the Revolution its worst personal human
qualities, and he seems not at all concerned with its politics.
In the Virginia Gazette of 1768 and 1769, while he resided with the
Ruffin family at Mayfield near Petersburg and then at Sweet Hall in King
William (for the still extant houses see Chapter VIII above), the lonely
scholar published under the pseudonym HCaledoniensis" a remarkable
group of essays on moral and religious subjects and poems ranging from
vers de societe and the trivial to a Christmas hymn and a meditative piece
with some satiric quality. Lines "To my Pen" (Virginia Gazette, September
15, 1768) are playfully sardonic. On November 3 and 10 the Gazette
carried mock-elegies, one at least written with a degree of tenderness, on
the loss of a caged bird, pet of the family at Mayfield. The second, an
"Epitaph" begins
Below this turf a being lies
Who was not saint nor sinner,
Yet men such company do prize,
And wish them of a larger size
If hungry, when at dinner.
In his final poem in the newspaper, "To Ignorance," Reid displays his
dislike, even indignation, at his own treatment in King William County,
to which his "family" had moved before March 1769. He seems to admit
that on the ballroom floor he was out of place, that he was laughed at for
his shabby clothes, and that he was generally considered an eccentric. This
poem is far more personal than his prose satire, though both show the
sensitive and learned colonist reacting against a dominant society which he
was sure misunderstood or at least failed to appreciate him. He ponders on
those who deride him :
A scoff, a sneer, is loaded with such magick
As bids defiance to all rules of logick:
A well tim'd grin can baffle all the ru1es
So much admir'd by the du11 sons of schools,
Who losing thee thus lose their greatest good . ...
Blest IGNORANCE! who giv'st us halcyon days,
I'll raise a monument unto thy praise.
Thus in the bitterness of self-examination and observation on the evils of
the society about him Reid is another southerner closer to Faulkner or
Robert Penn Warren than to his contemporary Jefferson. For he was a
southern puritan, not Puritan, as were dozens of other writers of the region
from Alexander Whitaker to the mid-twentieth century.
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