And again, in a letter written in her girlhood to her brother about 1743, Eliza Pinckney says of the people of Carolina: 

“The people in genl are hospitable and honest, and the better sort add to these a polite gentile behaviour.  The poorer sort are the most indolent people in the world or they could never be wretched in so plentiful a country as this.  The winters here are very fine and pleasant, but 4 months in the year is extreamly disagreeable, excessive hott, much thunder and lightening and muskatoes and sand flies in abundance.”

“Crs Town, the Metropolis, is a neat, pretty place.  The inhabitants polite and live in a very gentile manner.  The streets and houses regularly built—­the ladies and gentlemen gay in their dress; upon the whole you will find as many agreeable people of both sexes for the size of the place as almost any where...."[158]

Companies great enough to give the modern housewife nervous prostration were often entertained at dinners, while many of the planters kept such open house that no account was kept of the number of guests who came and went daily and who commonly made themselves so much at home that the host or hostess often scarcely disturbed them throughout their entire stay.  Several years after the Revolution George Washington recorded in his diary the surprising fact that for the first time since he and Martha Washington had returned to Mount Vernon, they had dined alone.  As Wharton says in her Martha Washington, “Warm hearted, open-handed hospitality was constantly exercised at Mount Vernon, and if the master humbly recorded that, although he owned a hundred cows, he had sometimes to buy butter for his family, the entry seems to have been made in no spirit of fault finding.”  Of this same Washingtonian hospitality one French traveller, Brissot de Warville, wrote:  “Every thing has an air of simplicity in his [Washington’s] house; his table is good, but not ostentatious; and no deviation is seen from regularity and domestic economy.  Mrs. Washington superintends the whole, and joins to the qualities of an excellent housewife that simple dignity which ought to characterize a woman whose husband has acted the greatest part on the theater of human affairs; while she possesses that amenity and manifests that attention to strangers which renders hospitality so charming."[159]

With such hospitality there seemed to go a certain elevation in the social life of Virginia and South Carolina entirely different from the corrupt conditions found in Louisiana in the seventeenth century, and also in contrast with the almost cautious manner in which the New Englanders of the same period tasted pleasure.  In those magnificent Southern houses—­Quincey speaks of one costing L8000, a sum fully equal in modern buying capacity to $100,000—­there was much stately dancing, almost an extreme form of etiquette, no little genuine art, and music of exceptional