Boiling was the most eminent Southern poet before the Revolution, and his writing and his life demonstrate some of the profound problems of cultural identity faced by even the wealthiest members of the colonial gentry. Like other sons of the Virginia gentry such as the playwright Robert Munford and the Patriot writer Robert Bland, he attended a prestigious school at Wakefield in England (1751—1755), where he acquired a thorough knowledge of the classics. Boiling's life and the role that literature played in it were typical of Virginia gentlemen of the colonial era, who cultivated hobbies of writing history, poetry, and belles lettres both as proof of their cultivation and refinement and as a central occasion for friendship and sociability with their peers. Writing for Boiling was not a vocation but an amusing and improving diversion from his main duties as one of Virginia's major landholders, and the minor...