CHAPTER XXII

RANDOM RICHMOND NOTES

Richmond may again be likened to Boston as a literary center.  In an article published some years ago in “Book News” Alice M. Tyler refers to Colonel William Byrd, who founded Richmond in 1733, as the sprightliest and most genial native American writer before Franklin.  In the time of Chief Justice Marshall, Richmond had a considerable group of novelists, historians and essayists, but the great literary name connected with the place is that of Edgar Allan Poe, who spent much of his boyhood in the city and later edited the “Southern Literary Messenger.”  Matthew Fontaine Maury, the great scientist, mentioned in an earlier chapter, was, at another time, editor of the same periodical, as was also John Reuben Thompson, “Poet of the Confederacy,” who wrote, among other poems, “Music in Camp,” and who translated Gustave Nadaud’s familiar poem, “Carcassonne.”

Thomas Nelson Page made his home in Richmond for thirty years; Amelie Rives was born there and still maintains her residence in Albemarle County, Virginia, while among other writers of the present time connected with the city either by birth or long association are, Henry Sydnor Harrison, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, Marion Harland, Kate Langley Bosher, James Branch Cabell, Edward Peple, dramatist, J.H.  Whitty, biographer of Poe, and Colonel W. Gordon McCabe, soldier, historian, essayist, and local character—­a gentleman upon whose shoulders such imported expressions as litterateur, bon viveur, and raconteur alight as naturally as doves on friendly shoulders.

Colonel McCabe is a link between present-day Richmond and the traditions and associations of England.  He was the friend of Lord Roberts, he introduced Lord Tennyson to Bull Durham tobacco, and, as is fitting under the circumstances, he speaks and writes of a hotel as “an hotel.”

Henry Sydnor Harrison did his first writing as book reviewer on the Richmond “Times-Dispatch,” of which paper he later became paragrapher and daily poet, and still later editor in chief.  It is commonly reported in Richmond that the characters in his novel “Queed,” the scenes of which are laid in Richmond, were “drawn from life.”  I asked Mr. Harrison about this.

“When the book appeared,” he said, “I was much embarrassed by the disposition of Richmond people—­human and natural, I suppose, when you ’know the author’—­to identify all the imaginary persons with various local characters.  Some characteristics of the political boss in my story were in a degree suggested by a local celebrity; Stewart Bryan is indicated, in passing, as Stewart Byrd; and the bare bones of a historic case, altered at will, were employed in another connection.  But I think I am stating the literal truth when I say that no figure in the book is borrowed from life.”

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