Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
"The Little Book" proper, in perhaps the most effective of Hudibrastic
verses of the lot. This is an all-out attack on Dinwiddie and the miseries
he has brought upon the colony. "Ad Virginia Dolentum" is concerned with
ways of "freeing the shoulder" of the provincial taxpayer. The final letters
allude specifically to certain tax laws and tax collectors, both within the
colony and outside.
The manuscript seems to have grown into its present form between 1754
and 1757, with perhaps more than one author, but probably reflecting the
Irish background of John Mercer and many of the indentured servants in
the colony, the latter simply for their dialect and as personae for the
author. As a whole this collection of prose and poetry is a strong personal
attack on the integrity of a southern colonial governor, or on the economic
and political and military policies of that gentleman, even at times on
the "Grandees," or members of the Council, in the colony. It is also an
attack on British imperial policy. There are evidences besides the reference
to the author of "The Little Book" in the Maryland Gazette which indicate
that it was known in manuscript through most of Virginia and southern
Maryland. As verse, some portions are as effective as most of the English
political satiric poetry of the period.
Then there is internal evidence that the author or authors knew and
employed the classics and a variety of contemporary literature, including
the liberal or Whig volumes by Molesworth and Hanway and others.
Reference to or quotation from the Earl of Rochester's verses; Hamlet and
The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It and Othello and Henry IV,
Part I; legal phrases; Swift, Cervantes, La Fontaine, Pope, Francis Bacon,
and John Gay occur, often several times. The author or authors show
themselves, as does the author of the Hogarthian satire in the Maryland
Gazette, as capable of far more than invective, pun, or Hudibrastic thrusts.
Literary men of parts wrote these prose-verse pieces. And these satires
suggest the variety of purposes within the moral frame to which the forms
might be put. Among other things, "Dinwiddianae" prepared the way for
the first-rate political and social prose on such subjects as are here mentioned
as the Pistole Fee and the slightly later Parson's Cause (Two­
Penny Act ) and the Stamp Act crises. This is public-service satire which
some contemporaries of the author(s), such as Richard Bland and Landon
Carter, and lesser men like Thomas Burke and Richard Hewitt and a
dozen others, made into the verse or prose in gazette or in pamphlet which
was to be the first literary product of Revolutionary America. But in its
extensive and on the whole clever use of dialect it also presages the dialect
humor of Brackenridge and the later southern backwoods humorists.87
Immediately after the colonial period, in the summer and fall of 1766,
Robert Bolling of Chellowe, Buckingham County, Dr. Thomas Burke,
1380