friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery.  He held many offices in the government of the colony, and founded the cities of Richmond and Petersburg.  His estates were large, and at Westover—­where he had one of the finest private libraries in America—­he exercised a baronial hospitality, blending the usual profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled scholar and “picked man of countries.”  Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in literature.  His History of the Dividing Line is written with a jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, and which gives to the painful journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday expedition.  Similar in tone were his diaries of A Progress to the Mines and A Journey to the Land of Eden in North Carolina.

The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverly, “a native and inhabitant of the place,” whose History of Virginia was printed at London in 1705.  Beverly was a rich planter and large slave-owner, who, being in London in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the manuscript of a forthcoming work, Oldmixon’s British Empire in America.  Beverly was set upon writing his history by the inaccuracies in this, and likewise because the province “has been so misrepresented to the common people of England as to make them believe that the servants in Virginia are made to draw in cart and plow, and that the country turns all people black”—­an impression which lingers still in parts of Europe.  The most original portions of the book are those in which the author puts down his personal observations of the plants and animals of the New World, and particularly the account of the Indians, to which his third book is devoted, and which is accompanied by valuable plates.  Beverly’s knowledge of these matters was evidently at first hand, and his descriptions here are very fresh and interesting.  The more strictly historical part of his work is not free from prejudice and inaccuracy.  A more critical, detailed, and impartial, but much less readable, work was William Stith’s History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia, 1747, which brought the subject down only to the year 1624.  Stith was a clergyman, and at one time a professor in William and Mary College.

The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmen.  The Church of England was established by law, and non-conformity was persecuted in various ways.  Three missionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by the Puritans of New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and one from New Haven.  They were not suffered to preach, but many resorted to them in private houses, until, being finally driven out by fines and imprisonments, they took refuge in Catholic Maryland.  The Virginia clergy were not, as a body, very much of a force in education or literature.  Many of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed condition of their parishes, lived as domestic chaplains with the wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their passion for gaming and hunting.  Few of them inherited the zeal of Alexander Whitaker, the “Apostle of Virginia,” who came over in 1611 to preach to the colonists and convert the Indians, and who published in furtherance of those ends Good News from Virginia, in 1613, three years before his death by drowning in the James River.