John Davis, an English traveller, poet, translator and novelist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, found this out to his cost. Passing through South Carolina in 1798 and 1799, he was surprised to find that his poetic imitations were of little interest to the lowland planters:  
I indulged in the composition of lyric poetry, and when I had produced an Ode, transmitted it to Freneau, at Charleston, who published it in his Gazette. But planters have little disposition for poetry, and the eye of the Carolina reader was diverted from my effusions, by the more interesting advertisements for fugitive slaves (Davis, 1803). [My emphasis]  
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[^0]:    4 We should also recall here the work of Natalie Zemon Davis on letters of remission, analysed from the standpoint of fiction: 'I want to let the "fictional" aspects of these documents [letters of remission] be the center of analysis. By "fictional" I do not mean their feigned elements, but rather, using the other and broader sense of the root word fingere, their forming, shaping, and molding elements: the crafting of a narrative.' Zemon Davis, 1987: 3.  
His judgment is of course doubly ironic. John Davis, like many travellers, deplored the lack of culture of the planters whose only interests seemed to be the day-to-day management of their slave workforce, present or absent. However, he was oblivious to the irony here: the advertisements for fugitives, those little stories and accounts of the everyday, maybe actually were 'more interesting' than his imitations of Horace's odes. Not only because the main preoccupation of the planters was their slaves, but because those notices were much more than mere notices: they were accounts of events and depictions of characters all of whom were or could have been familiar, little snatches of daily life.