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 dear " but law, physic, and strong drink." No doubt the average colonist in Virginia, when not sobered by important cares, was apt to be a fellow of coarse fibre, whose
"addiction was to courses vain;
His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow;
His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports;
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity."
Bat to many a scapegrace had come "reformation in a flood, with such a heady current, scouring faults," as to make a notable man of him. There were at least the traditions of culture in the colony, and enough men of education and refinement to leaven the mass. Life ran generously, even if roughly, upon the scattered plantations, and strong, thinking, high - bred men had somehow a mastery and leadership in it all which made them feel Virginia their home and field of honor.
Change of time and of affairs, the stir of growing life in Virginia as she ceased from being a mere colony and became a sturdy commonwealth, boasting her own breed of gentlemen, merchants, scholars, and statesmen, laid upon the Washingtons, as upon other men, a touch of transformation. Seventy-six years had gone by since John Washington came out of Bedfordshire and took up lands on Bridges' Creek in Westmoreland in Virginia, and still his children were to be found in the old seats he had chosen at the first. They had become thorough Virginians with the rest, woven into the close fibre of the new life. Westmoreland and all the counties that lay about it on the Northern Neck were strictly of a piece with the rest of Virginia, for all they had waited long to be settled. There the Washingtons had become country gentlemen of comfortable estate upon the accepted model. John had begotten Lawrence, and Lawrence had begotten Augustine. John had thriftily taken care to see his offspring put in a way to prosper at the very first. He had acquired a substantial property of his own where the land lay very fertile upon the banks of the Potomac, and he had, besides, by three marriages, made good a very close connection with several families that had thriven thereabouts before him. He had become a notable figure, indeed, among his neighbors ere he had been many years in the colony—a colonel in their militia, and their representative in the House of Burgesses; and they had not waited for his death to call the parish in which he lived Washington Parish. His sons and grandsons, though they slackened a little the pace he had set them in his energy at the outset, throve none the less substantially upon the estates he had left them, abated nothing of the dignity and worth they had inherited, lived simply, and kept their place of respect in the parish and state.