ngs abundantly
evince; but to taste the pleasures of dangerous adventure, to learn war
and to pick up his living with his sword, and to fight wherever piety
showed recompense would follow, was the passion of his youth, while his
manhood was given to the arduous ambition of enlarging the domains
of England and enrolling his name among those heroes who make an
ineffaceable impression upon their age. There was no time in his life
when he had leisure to marry, or when it would have been consistent with
his schemes to have tied himself to a home.

As a writer he was wholly untrained, but with all his introversions and
obscurities he is the most readable chronicler of his time, the most
amusing and as untrustworthy as any. He is influenced by his prejudices,
though not so much by them as by his imagination and vanity. He had a
habit of accurate observation, as his maps show, and this trait gives
to his statements and descriptions, when his own reputation is not
concerned, a value beyond that of those of most contemporary travelers.
And there is another thing to be said about his writings. They are
uncommonly clean for his day. Only here and there is coarseness
encountered. In an age when nastiness was written as well as spoken, and
when most travelers felt called upon to satisfy a curiosity for prurient
observations, Smith preserved a tone quite remarkable for general
purity.

Captain Smith is in some respects a very good type of the restless
adventurers of his age; but he had a little more pseudo-chivalry at one
end of his life, and a little more piety at the other, than the rest.
There is a decidedly heroic element in his courage, hardihood, and
enthusiasm, softened to the modern observer's comprehension by the
humorous contrast between his achievements and his estimate of them.
Between his actual deeds as he relates them, and his noble sentiments,
there is also sometimes a contrast pleasing to the worldly mind. He is
just one of those characters who would be more agreeable on the stage
than in private life. His extraordinary conceit would be entertaining if
one did not see too much of him. Although he was such a romancer that we
can accept few of his unsupported statements about himself, there was,
nevertheless, a certain verity in his character which showed something
more than loyalty to his own fortune; he could be faithful to an
ambition for the public good. Those who knew him best must have found
in him very likable