William Byrd: Satirist

Abstract

T t HE glittering London literary world of Addison, Congreve, Swift, Gay, and Pope seems at far remove from the contemporary pattern of life on that outer fringe of civilization, the VirginiaCarolina frontier. Nevertheless, the recently discovered early writings of William Byrd II' show his pen, which drew the crudities of Lubberland, to have been guided and sharpened by his nineteen years' residence in Augustan London. Byrd's famous History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina is not, as was long believed, the first and unique literary effort of a Virginia planter who was only unconsciously a man of letters. 2 On the contrary, that minor masterpiece of early American realism was the culmination of thirty years' apprenticeship to the trade of writer as practiced by the most fashionable and polished English masters of his age. The formative period of Byrd's literary activities runs from i696 to I726, and all but eleven of these thirty years were spent in England.3 During his nineteen years abroad he wrote vers de societe, character sketches, essays in the form of letters, humorous satire, an epigrammatic epitaph, and translations from Latin done, according to Dryden's theory, freely and for literary effect. With the exception of a burlesque published anonymously in I704, some verses written at Tunbridge Wells in J7i8-i9, and possibly a translation of Petronius, none of his compositions seems to have found its way into print during his lifetime.4 In this, too,