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