tory of the Virginia Company, 1869; Stith's Settlement of Virginia, 1865.) It will be found important, as throwing light on our later literary development, to look carefully at these early emigrants who laid the foundation of Virginia. Of the one hundred and five men who composed the first expedition, nearly one-half were "gentlemen" with absolutely no experience in manual labor, and a large proportion of the remainder were soldiers and servants. They were of the Royalist party, and the Church of England. Many of them had squandered their ancestral estates and now sought America, led on by dreams of sudden conquest, and dazzling riches. Many were adventurers born of the protracted wars with Spain; some were worthless idlers, and even criminals fleeing from justice. Not one of them dreamed of a permanent home in the new land. They had had no falling out with the mother country; they had no desire to found a new order of society; they were without religious scruples or anything else, save a desire for speedy wealth—for gold that could be picked up in large nuggets without exertion.
Many of the later arrivals, drawn by the rich tobacco plantation, were from the higher classes, yet during the first half-century "the large proportion of the settlers in Virginia were of inferior quality, personally and socially," and many of them were broken men, adventurers, bankrupts, criminals."
The Physical Geography of Virginia had much to do in shaping its history. It has a delightful climate, a soil of marvellous fertility; it is traversed by numerous
