of the Colony which read,—­“It shall be permitted to none but the Council and Heads of Hundreds to wear gold in their clothes, or to wear silk till they make it themselves.”  What, then, could Miss Softdown do with the silks and breastpins brought from London?  “Let her wear deer-skin and arrow-head,” said the natives.  But Miss Softdown soon had her way.  Still more were these new families shocked, when, on ringing for some newly purchased negro domestic, the said negro came into the parlor nearly naked.  Then began one of the most extended controversies in the history of Virginia,—­the question being, whether out-door negroes should wear clothes, and domestics dress like other people.  The popular belief, in which it seems the negroes shared, was, that the race would perish, if subjected to clothing the year round.  The custom of negro men going about in puris naturalibus prevailed to a much more recent period than is generally supposed.

One by one, the barbarisms of Old Virginia were eradicated, and the danger was then that effeminacy would succeed; but a better class of families began to come from England, now that the Colony was somewhat prepared for them.  These aimed to make Virginia repeat England:  it might have repeated something worse, and in the end has.  About one or two old mansions in Maryland and Virginia the long silvery grass characteristic of the English park is yet found:  the seed was carefully brought from England by those gentlemen who came under Raleigh’s administration, and who regarded their residence in these Colonies as patriotic self-devotion.  On one occasion, the writer, walking through one of these fields, startled an English lark, which rose singing and soaring skyward.  It sang a theme of the olden time.  Governor Spottswood brought with him, when he came, a number of these larks, and made strenuous efforts to domesticate them in the neighborhood of Fredericksburg, Virginia.  He did not succeed.  Now and then we have heard of one’s being seen, companionless.  It is a sad symbol of that nobler being who tried to domesticate himself in Virginia, the fine old English gentleman.  He is now seen but little oftener than the silver grass and the lark which he brought with him.  But let no one think, whilst ridiculing those who can now only hide their poor stature under the lion-skin of F-F-V-ism, that the race of old Virginia gentlemen is a mythic race.  Through the fair slopes of Eastern Virginia we have wandered and counted the epitaphs of as princely men and women as ever trod this continent.  Yonder is the island, floating on the crystal Rappahannock, which, instead of, as now, masking the guns which aim at Freedom’s heart, once bore witness to the noble Spottswood’s effort to realize for the working-man a Utopia in the New World.  Yonder is the house, on the same river, frowning now with the cannon which defend the slave-shamble, (for the Richmond railroad passes on its verge,) where Washington was reared to love justice