Initial Studies in American Letters | Page 4

as hath happened in Virginia since the first planting of
that colony," printed at London in 1608. Among Smith's other books
the most important is perhaps his General History of Virginia (London,
1624), a compilation of various narratives by different hands, but
passing under his name. Smith was a man of a restless and daring spirit,
full of resource, impatient of contradiction, and of a somewhat
vainglorious nature, with an appetite for the marvelous and a
disposition to draw the longbow. He had seen service in many parts of
the world, and his wonderful adventures lost nothing in the telling. It
was alleged against him that the evidence of his prowess rested almost
entirely on his own testimony. His truthfulness in essentials has not,
perhaps, been successfully impugned, but his narratives have suffered
by the embellishments with which he has colored them; and, in
particular, the charming story of Pocahontas saving his life at the risk

of her own--the one romance of early Virginian history--has passed into
the realm of legend.
Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the
interest of the events which they describe and the diverting but forcible
personality which they unconsciously display. They are the
rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was
mightier than his pen. As Smith returned to England after two years in
Virginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement of
which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be
claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George Sandys, who
came to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed
his excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, in
the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by that
imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and repose,
having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the muses."
Sandys went back to England for good probably as early as 1625, and
can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first American poet, on the
strength of his paraphrase of the Metamorphoses, than he can be
reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor because he "introduced the first
water-mill into America."
The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern colonies which
took their point of departure from Virginia, is almost wholly of this
historical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is concerned with the
internal affairs of the province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in 1676,
one of the most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary annals, and
of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them anonymous,
and only rescued from a manuscript condition a hundred years after the
event. Another part is concerned with the explorations of new territory.
Such were the "Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel William Byrd,
who was appointed in 1729 one of the commissioners to fix the
boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, and gave an account of
the survey in his History of the Dividing Line, which was printed only
in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the most brilliant figures of colonial
Virginia, and a type of the Old Virginia gentleman. He had been sent to
England for his education, where he was admitted to the bar of the

Middle Temple, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and formed an
intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery. He held
many offices in the government of the colony, and founded the cities of
Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were large, and at
Westover--where he had one of the finest private libraries in
America--he exercised a baronial hospitality, blending the usual
profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled scholar and
"picked man of countries." Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in
literature. His History of the Dividing Line is written with a jocularity
which rises occasionally into real humor, and which gives to the painful
journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday expedition. Similar
in tone were his diaries of A Progress to the Mines and A Journey to
the Land of Eden in North Carolina.
The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverly, "a native and
inhabitant of the place," whose History of Virginia was printed at
London in 1705. Beverly was a rich planter and large slave-owner, who,
being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the manuscript
of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon's British Empire in America. Beverly
was set upon writing his history by the inaccuracies in this, and
likewise because the province "has been so misrepresented to the
common people of England as to make them believe that the servants in
Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow,