plantation life to city life; the fertile soil and the unintelligent labor of slaves or "indentured" servants made agriculture, particularly the growing of tobacco, the most profitable industry; and the many rivers and creeks, allowing vessels to land their cargoes almost at the planter's door, rendered seaport towns unnecessary. Printing-presses were long forbidden by the king, and until past the middle of the eighteenth century there was but one printing-house in all Virginia. The more intelligent Virginians were not indifferent to education : private schools were soon established, and a college was planned as early as 1622, although circumstances delayed its actual founding until 1693. But the Virginians, as a whole, had not much zeal for education; the difficulty of providing instruction for all was greatly increased by the sparseness of the population; and in consequence the mass of the people were comparatively illiterate. In brief, colonial Virginia lacked the mental stimulus of life in towns and cities, where mind kindles mind by contact; if books were written, it was difficult to get them printed; and if they were printed, there were few people to read them. In such conditions the production of a large body of literature is not to be expected.

Yet some literature there was. Rev. JAMES BLAIR, the founder of William and Mary College, and for fifty years its president, published in 1722 a volume of discourses on the Sermon on the Mount; and, in conjunction with

1 Even the better class of planters, loving field-sports and life in the open air, cared less for books than did the New Englander. The clergymen, sent over by the authorities of the Church of England as good enough for a colony, were often ignorant and immoral. The indentured white servants (many of them paupers and convicts) and the negro slaves were of course mostly indifferent to education.

other writers, The Present State of Virginia and the College (1727). Professor HUGH JONES wrote an unpretentious little book, The Present State of Virginia (1724), very plain in style, but containing sensible suggestions for the betterment of the colony and some amusing strictures on the indolence of the inhabitants. A much more interesting work is the History of Virginia (1705, 1722), by ROBERT BEVERLEY, whose style, although not highly polished, is flowing and often vivid. This book, by a native Virginian and about Virginia, reminds us that in the older colonies there was now growing up a generation American by birth, American in spirit, and moulded. largely by American conditions. Henceforth we may expect to hear a more distinctively American note in colonial literature. In fact, the author to be spoken of next is clearly a product, in part, of the new conditions. Colonel WILLIAM BYRD (1674-1744) inherited a princely fortune and high social position. After being educated abroad, he returned to Virginia, where he held high offices for many years, and on his estates at Westover collected a library of nearly four thousand volumes. He left several works in manuscript, the principal of which is *The History of the Dividing Line, a journal of the expedition that in 1729 ran the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. Here and elsewhere Byrd has a lightness of touch, a gayety, a lively fancy, a sparkling wit, a dash and gusto which make his pages delightful reading. They show the literary polish of the England of Addison and Pope; but they show something more. In Colonel Byrd the Virginian aristocracy of the earlier day came to full flower; and his writings contain the very essence of that careless, sunny, free-limbed life of

the English Cavalier transplanted to the fresher air and wider spaces of the New World. Rev. WILLIAM STITH, a native of Virginia, and president of William and Mary College, brought out in 1747 The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia. The book is clear and careful, commanding respect if not admiration, and forms a worthy close to the pre-Revolutionary literature of the principal colony of the South.

2. LITERATURE IN NEW ENGLAND.

The literature. of colonial New England was more abundant than that of Virginia and somewhat different in savor. The causes for this lay in the nature of the colonists and the country. The sterile soil and severe climate did not allow of large plantations cultivated by wasteful slave-labor; only the small farmer, working with the shrewd and tireless industry of a proprietor, could wring a profit from the stony hillsides. The rocky coast, with few large rivers but many harbors, favored the growth of seaport towns. Furthermore, while in Virginia the unit of population was the family, in New England it was at first the church, or congregation, knit together by a common faith and assembling every Sunday in a common building, the "meeting-house." These conditions, by producing a concentration of population, stimulated intellectual activity and made easier the establishment of common schools. The characteristics of the colonists tended to the same results. Most of the settlers of New England were "Separatists." On account of their dis

1 It was printed in the colony, and is a very creditable piece of typography.

satisfaction with certain things in the Church of England they had left it or been driven out of it, and had formed separate churches of their own; and their motive in coming three thousand miles across a stormy ocean was to build up in the New World a Commonwealth of the Reformed Faith. Like all reformers they were men of independent thought; they held an intellectual form of religion; and they believed that every man must search the Scriptures for himself, under the guidance of a learned ministry, and work out his own salvation in fear and logic. Hence they thought it a duty to teach every child to read the Bible; and so schools were planted almost as soon as corn, while Harvard College was founded only six years later than Boston itself.1 In consequence of these characteristics and conditions the level of intelligence throughout New England was very high, and there was from the first a literary class, composed chiefly of clergymen and magistrates, who had the capacity, learning, and industry to write many books.2

The same causes which made the literature abundant made it also sombre and often dull. Much of it consists of religious works, and nearly all is permeated with the atmosphere of a faith which had more of gloom than of sunshine. Yet strength is here too, the strength of the Puritan character and the Puritan creed; in the earlier years the romance of the New World tinges even the

1"By the year 1649 every colony in New England, except Rhode Island, had made public instruction compulsory." —Tyler's A History of American Literature, Vol. I., p. 99.

2 "At one time . . . there was in Massachusetts and Connecticut a Cambridge graduate for every two hundred and fifty inhabitants."Ibid., p. 98.

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pages of the prosaic annalist; the sublime if gloomy poetry inherent in Calvinism gives a certain greatness to many a heavy sermon and dull poem; and throughout the whole mass of this literature can be felt the intellectual solidity, moral soundness, and sturdy practical sense of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Among the earliest writings were naturally Diaries, Histories, and Descriptions. The events of the first year of the Plymouth Colony were recorded in the *Journal of WILLIAM BRADFORD and EDWARD WINSLOW, written in unvarnished style, but vivid and full of interesting incidents. In this daily record we may live over again the life of the Pilgrims- their search along the wintry coast for a good site for a settlement, their first encounter with Indians, their landing at Plymouth, and their terrible sufferings during the first winter. The *History of Plymouth, by the same William Bradford, for thirty years governor of the colony, comes down to 1646.1 Like much of the contemporary prose written in England, it has at times a large though artless beauty,

1 The manuscript has had a remarkable history. By Bradford's grandson, John Bradford, it was intrusted to Thomas Prince, who used it in compiling his History of New England. Governor Hutchinson had it when he published the second volume of The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in 1767. From that time no one knew of its whereabouts for many years. In 1855 it was discovered to be in the library of the Bishop of London, though how it got there is still a mystery. The next year the history was printed for the first time, by the Massachusetts Historical Society, from a transcript of the original. In 1897, by a graceful act of international courtesy, a decree of the Episcopal Court of London gave the manuscript into the hands of the United States Ambassador, to be by him delivered to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This was done; and the precious volume, "bound in parchment, once white, but now grimy and much the worse for wear," after long and strange journeyings rests once more in the nation whose founding it describes.