’The worst speak something good:  if all want sense, God takes a text and preacheth patience.’

There are one or two other points in Mr. Sawin’s letter which I would also briefly animadvert upon.  And first, concerning the claim he sets up to a certain superiority of blood and lineage in the people of our Southern States, now unhappily in rebellion against lawful authority and their own better interests.  There is a sort of opinions, anachronisms at once and anachorisms, foreign both to the age and the country, that maintain a feeble and buzzing existence, scarce to be called life, like winter flies, which in mild weather crawl out from obscure nooks and crannies to expatiate in the sun, and sometimes acquire vigor enough to disturb with their enforced familiarity the studious hours of the scholar.  One of the most stupid and pertinacious of these is the theory that the Southern States were settled by a class of emigrants from the Old World socially superior to those who founded the institutions of New England.  The Virginians especially lay claim to this generosity of lineage, which were of no possible account, were it not for the fact that such superstitions are sometimes not without their effect on the course of human affairs.  The early adventurers to Massachusetts at least paid their passages; no felons were ever shipped thither; and though it be true that many deboshed younger brothers of what are called good families may have sought refuge in Virginia, it is equally certain that a great part of the early deportations thither were the sweepings of the London streets and the leavings of the London stews.  It was this my Lord Bacon had in mind when he wrote:  ’It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people and wicked condemned men to be the people with whom you plant.’  That certain names are found there is nothing to the purpose, for, even had an alias been beyond the invention of the knaves of that generation, it is known that servants were often called by their masters’ names, as slaves are now.  On what the heralds call the spindle side, some, at least, of the oldest Virginian families are descended from matrons who were exported and sold for so many hogsheads of tobacco the head.  So notorious was this, that it became one of the jokes of contemporary playwrights, not only that men bankrupt in purse and character were ‘food for the Plantations’ (and this before the settlement of New England), but also that any drab would suffice to wive such pitiful adventurers.  ’Never choose a wife as if you were going to Virginia,’ says Middleton in one of his comedies.  The mule is apt to forget all but the equine side of his pedigree.  How early the counterfeit nobility of the Old Dominion became a topick of ridicule in the Mother Country may be learned from a play of Mrs. Behn’s, founded on the Rebellion of Bacon:  for even these kennels of literature may yield a fact or two to pay the raking.  Mrs. Flirt, the keeper