Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the “two great distributing centers of the English race.”  The men who colonized the country between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from the literary or bookish classes in the old country.  Many of the first settlers were gentlemen—­too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good of the plantation.  Some among these were men of worth and spirit, “of good means and great parentage.”  Such was, for example, George Percy, a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the original adventurers, and the author of A Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern Colony of Virginia, which contains a graphic narrative of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown.  But many of these gentlemen were idlers, “unruly gallants, packed thither by their friends to escape ill destinies,” dissipated younger sons, soldiers of fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to abound in the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls and drinking at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern.  With these was a sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the on-scourings of the London streets, fruit of press-gangs and jail deliveries, sent over to “work in the plantations.”

Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to literary growth.  The planters lived isolated on great estates which had water-fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake.  There the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the plantations.  Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally by a distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and careless life.  He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and cock-fighting.  There were no large towns, and the planters met each other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the Burgesses.  The court-house was the nucleus of social and political life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in New England.  In such a state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education did not exist.  Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor of the colony from 1641 to 1677, said, in 1670, “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years.”  In the matter of printing this pious wish was well-nigh realized.  The first press set up in the colony, about 1681, was soon suppressed, and found no successor until the year 1729.  From that date until some ten years before the Revolution one printing-press answered the needs of Virginia, and this was under official control.  The earliest newspaper in the colony was the Virginia Gazette, established in 1736.