Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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• 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
· Literature, Principally Belletristic . later governor of North Carolina and then resident of Hungar's Parish on the Eastern Shore, and the Reverend Richard Hewitt, minister of the aforementioned parish, all wrote poetry attacking the attempt of an old guard conservative party headed by Robinsons and Randolphs to preserve the union of the speakership of the House of Burgesses and the treasurer ship of the colony. John Randolph, Jr., Benjamin Grymes, Landon Carter, and Archibald Cary-all but Randolph later to be patriots-represented the other side in what was at various times a backroom, publicly open, and newspaper-and-pamphlet dispute. Several pieces in the two Virginia Gazettes of the period were written by various of these gentlemen, with probably Carter, Burke, Bolling, and Hewitt the most prolific. Though a recent collection of Burke's poems presents several satiric verses against Landon Carter and others yet unidentified, and lemay's edition of Bolling's poems will present other specimens from this intracolonial series of political skirmishes, perhaps the most ambitious verse springing from this literary struggle was The Contest, appearing in pamphlet form almost certainly in these months of 1776. Professor Lemay, who has investigated the situation, finds many internal and external evidences that it was written by the Reverend Richard Hewitt. It was presented at a celebration of the repeal of the Stamp Act at Northampton Court on the Eastern Shore. Unfortun ately the printed poem survives in only four pages-I, 4, 9, and la-for tunately including both beginning and conclusion. The historian Charles Campbell in his History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1860, p. 545n) quotes fifteen lines from the extant portions. In fact, the surviving printed pages of the pamphlet have been marginally annotated with identifications by Campbell, with interrogation marks by certain names. Canto I begins Hail, patriotick Bard! who, Song sublime, From Eastern to our Western Shore present! My gratitude to thee may I express, In humble verse, and not with Rhyme adorn'd? The mock-heroic lines mention some of the participants in the paper war fare by their real names, as (Landon) Carter and (Thomas) Burke, others by their estates, as (Bolling) of Chellowe, and others under Greek satiric names, as Metriotes (John Randolph, Jr.). Strongly Miltonic in phrase and meter, The Contest is one of the group Lemay describes in his detailed essay largely concerned with the same literary-political subjects. Equally or more interesting is Bolling's "A Key to the Virginia Gazettes, 1766" (printed in Purdie and Dixon's Virginia Gazette, January I, 1767, and surviving also in a manuscript version ) directly attacking Grymes, Carter, and Randolph among others, and praising Burke and Hewitt. "A 1381
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Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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