ach during the present century.

Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the "two great distributing
centers of the English race." The men who colonized the country
between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from
the literary or bookish classes in the Old Country. Many of the first
settlers were gentlemen--too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good
of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and spirit, "of
good means and great parentage." Such was, for example, George Percy,
a younger brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the
original adventurers, and the author of _A Discourse of the Plantation
of the Southern Colony of Virginia_, {326} which contains a graphic
narrative of the fever and famine summer of 1607 at Jamestown. But
many of these gentlemen were idlers, "unruly gallants, packed thither
by their friends to escape ill destinies;" dissipated younger sons,
soldiers of fortune, who came over after the gold which was supposed to
abound in the new country, and who spent their time in playing bowls
and drinking at the tavern as soon as there was any tavern. With these
was a sprinkling of mechanics and farmers, indented servants, and the
off-scourings of the London streets, fruit of press gangs and jail
deliveries, sent over to "work in the plantations."

Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very favorable to
literary growth. The planters lived isolated on great estates, which
had water fronts on the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake. There
the tobacco, the chief staple of the country, was loaded directly upon
the trading vessels that tied up to the long, narrow wharves of the
plantations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally by a
distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived a free and
careless life. He was fond of fox-hunting, horse-racing, and
cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and the planters met each
other mainly on occasion of a county court or the assembling of the
Burgesses. The court-house was the nucleus of social and political
life in Virginia as the town-meeting was in New England. In such a
state of society schools were necessarily few, and popular education
did {327} not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal governor
of the colony from 1641 to 1677, said, in 1670, "I thank God there are
no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these
hundred years." In the