No man born in Virginia had a greater property than he, a house more luxuriously appointed, or a part to play more princely; and no man knew the value of position and wealth and social consideration more appreciatively. His breeding had greatly quickened his perception of such things. He had had a long training abroad, had kept very noble company alike in England and on the Continent, had been called to the bar in the Middle Temple and chosen a Fellow of the Royal Society, and so had won his freedom of the world of letters and of affairs. Yet he had returned to Virginia, as all her sons did, with only an added zest to serve and enjoy her. Many designs for her development throve because of his interest and encouragement; he sought her advantage jealously in her Council, as her agent in England, as owner of great tracts of her fertile lands. 'Twas he who brought to her shores some of her best settlers, gave her promise of veritable towns at Richmond and Petersburg, fought arbitrary power wherever it showed itself in her government, and proved himself in every way " a true and worthy inheritor of the feelings and opinions of the old cavaliers of Virginia." But through all his busy life he carried himself like the handsome, fortunate man he was, with a touch of gayety, a gallant spirit of comradeship, a zest for good books, spirited men, and comely women—heartily, like a man who, along with honor, sought the right pleasures of the world.
Nothing daunted the spirits of this manly gentleman, not even rough work at the depths of the forest, upon the public business of determining the southern boundary-line of the colony, or upon the private business of seeing to his own distant properties in North Carolina. It gave him only the better chance to see the world; and he was never at a loss for something to do. There were stray books to be found even in the cabins of the remotest settlers; or, if not, there was the piquant literary gossip of those laughing times of Queen Anne, but just gone by, to rehearse and comment upon. Colonel Byrd was not at a loss to find interesting ways in which even a busy man might make shift to enjoy " the Carolina felicity of having nothing to do." A rough people lived upon that frontier in his day, who showed themselves very anxious to be put upon the southern side of the line; for, if taken into Virginia, " they must have submitted to some sort of order and government; whereas in North Carolina every one does what seems best in his own eyes." "They pay no tribute," he laughs, " either to God or to Caesar." It would not be amiss, he thinks, were the clergy in Virginia, once in two or three years—not to make the thing burdensome —to "take a turn among these gentiles." "'Twould look a little apostolical," he argues, with the characteristic twinkle in his eye, "and they might hope to be requited for it hereafter, if that be not thought too long to tarry for their reward." A stray parson was to be found once and again even at the depths of the forest— on the Virginian side—though to find his humble quarters you must needs thread "a path as narrow as that which leads to heaven, but much more dirty"; but a stray parson was no great evangel. Colonel Byrd was too sound a gentleman not to be a good churchman; but he accounted it no sin to see where the humor lurks even in church. " Mr. Betty, the parson of the parish, entertained us with a good, honest sermon," he chronicles upon occasion; "but whether he bought it, or borrowed it, would have been uncivil in us to inquire. Be that as it will, he is a decent man, with a double chin that fits gracefully over his band.... When church was done we refreshed our teacher with a glass of wine, and then, receiving his blessing, took horse.'' 'Tis likely Colonel Byrd would have found small amusement in narrating the regular course of his life, his great errands and permanent concerns of weighty business. That he could as well leave to his biographer, should he chance to have one. For himself, he chose to tell the unusual things he had seen and heard and taken part in, and to make merry as well as he might by the way.
The Virginian writers were not all country gentlemen. There were austere and stately scholars, too, like the Reverend William Stith, who had held modest livings in more than one parish, had served the House of Burgesses as chaplain, and the college, first as instructor and then as president, until at length, having won "perfect leisure and retirement," he set himself in his last days to straighten into order the confusion of early Virginian history. "Such a work," he reflected,"will be a noble and elegant entertainment for my vacant hours, which it is not in my power to employ more to my own satisfaction, or the use and benefit of my country." What with his scholarly love of documents set forth at length, however, his painstaking recital of details, and his roundabout, pedantic style, his story of the first seventeen years of the colony lingered through a whole volume; and his friends' laggard subscriptions to that single prolix volume discouraged him from undertaking another. There was neither art nor quick movement enough in such work, much as scholars have prized it since, to take the taste of a generation that lived its life on horseback and spiced it with rough sport and direct speech. They could read with more patience the plain, business - like sentences of the Reverend Hugh Jones's Present State of Virginia and with more zest the downright, telling words in which the Reverend James Blair, "commissary" to the Bishop of London, spoke of their affairs.
James Blair, though born and bred in Scotland, educated at Edinburgh, and engaged as a minister at home till he was close upon thirty years of age, was as much a Virginian in his life and deeds as any man born in the Old Dominion. 'Twas he who had been the chief founder of the College of William and Mary, and who had served it as president through every vicissitude of fortune for fifty years. For fifty years he was a member, too, of the King's Council in the colony, and for fifty-eight the chief adviser of the mother Church in England concerning ecclesiastical affairs in Virginia. "Probably no other man in the colonial time did so much for the intellectual life of Virginia" as did this "sturdy and faithful" Scotsman. To the colonists, oftentimes, he seemed overbearing, dictatorial even, and, for all their "gentlemanly conformity to the Church of England," they did not mean to suffer any man to be set over them as bishop in Virginia; while to the royal governors he seemed sometimes a headstrong agitator -and demagogue, so stoutly did he stand up for the liberties of the people among whom he had cast his lot. He was in all things a doughty Scot. He made very straight for the ends he deemed desirable; dealt frankly, honestly, fearlessly with all men alike; confident of being in the right even when he was in the wrong; dealing with all as he thought he ought to deal, " whether they liked it or not"; incapable of discouragement, as he was also incapable of dishonor; a stalwart, formidable master of all work in church and college, piling up every day to his credit a great debt of gratitude from the colony, which honored him without quite liking him. It was very noteworthy that masterful men of many kinds took an irresistible liking to Virginia, though they were but sent upon an errand to it. There was Alexander Spotswood, for example, who, after he had been twelve years Lieutenant-Governor in the stead of his lordship the Earl of Orkney, spent eighteen more good years, all he had left, upon the forty-odd thousand acres of land he had acquired in the fair colony, as a country gentleman, very busy developing the manufacture of iron, and as busy as there was any need to be as Postmaster-General of the colonies. He came of a sturdy race of gentlemen, had seen service along with Marlborough and my uncle Toby " with the army in Flanders," had gone much about the world upon many errands and seen all manner of people, and then had found himself at last in Virginia when he was past forty. For all its rough life, he liked the Old Dominion well enough to adopt it as his home. There was there, he said, "less swearing, less profaneness, less drunkenness and debauchery, less uncharitable feuds and animosities, and less knavery and villany than in any part of the world " where his lot had been. Not all of his neighbors were gentlemen; not very many could afford to send their sons to England to be educated. Men of all sorts had crowded into Virginia: merchants and gentlemen not a few, but also commoner men a great many— mariners, artisans, tailors, and men without settled trades or handicrafts of any kind. Spotswood had found it no easy matter when he was Governor to deal patiently with a House of Burgesses to which so many men of "mean understandings" had been sent, and had allowed himself to wax very sarcastic when he found how ignorant some of them were. "I observe," he said, tartly, "that the grand ruling party in your House has not furnished chairmen of two of your standing committees who can spell English or write common - sense, as the grievances under their own handwriting will manifest." 'Twas not a country, either, where one could travel much at ease, for one must ford the streams for lack of bridges, and keep an eye sharply about him as he travelled the rude forest roads when the wind was high lest a rotten tree should fall upon him. Nature was so bountiful, yielded so easy a largess of food, that few men took pains to be thrifty, and some parts of the colony were little more advanced in the arts of life than North Carolina, where. Colonel Byrd said, nothing was