Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
quietly descriptive, the Itinerarium also indicates its author's ear for dialect
(Negro, Scottish, or Dutch ) and his interest in folk sayings and rustic
provincial dialogue. One of his earlier episodes, a stop at Treadway's Inn in
Cecil County, Maryland, shows that he was as able at description of country
colonial folk as Madame Knight showed herself to be in her account of
travels in New England. His book is largely a series of vignettes of individuals
and of character types, drawn more obviously from living models
than are those of William Byrd in his sketches. Quakers, Irishmen, Moravians,
Dutchmen, New England Yankees, and representatives of "occupations"
such as would·be gentlemen, tavern keepers, and bullies are among
the subjects of his pen. Like the later Washington Irving, he saw people
and incidents in terms of line and color, and he could sketch them in crayons
or delineate them verbally. His was probably the second earliest recorded
use of the term buckskin to denote a provincial frontiersman (a
few years later Landon Carter often signed himself A Buckskin in the newspapers
). His literary allusions are frequent, from Rabelais and Montaigne
and Cervantes to Shakespeare and Fielding. Only two years after the publication
of Joseph Andrews, he passed judgment on the novel, and it is
perceptive criticism.
In Philadelphia, New York, and Boston he was the guest of convivial
clubs, for he seems to have had entrees everywhere he went. Like all true
satirists, he tested for congruity. In Philadelphia he "observed severall
comicall, grotesque phizzes in the inn . . . which would have afforded
variety of hints for a painter of Hogarth's turn" (p. 18). Music and the
pictorial arts he noted frequently and conversed with painters and composers
and recorded his judgment of their creations or on performances of
their works. Like Byrd on the Dividing Line expedition, Hamilton en route
through the rural area is a gentleman among boors, and like the Virginian
he views and depicts primitive living-food, beds, houses-with distaste,
and describes people and manners of life ironically. Medical facilities
and practice he observes with interest. The reminders of the New
Light Presbyterians and other evangelicals he treats with sharp satire,
probably partly because of his own Presbyterian background and the fact
that he was now a practicing Anglican. And he recounts a number of
humorous and by no means original anecdotes, really American versions
of timeless tales of quacks, personal family feuds, and what has been
called a colonial version of a snipe hunt--of a fox and a gullible bumpkin.
A delightful book is this travel-diary narrative, not at all a promotion
tract. It is one of our few examples of a complete sense of the droll qualities
of colonial life.
The "History of the Tuesday Club" and the earlier "Record" are better
work than the Itinerarium, though the mock-histories and the travel ac-