ose, having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the
muses." Sandys went back to England for good, probably as early as
1625, and can, therefore, no more be reckoned as the first American
poet, on the strength of his paraphrase of the _Metamorphoses_, than he
can be reckoned the earliest Yankee inventor, because he "introduced
the first water-mill into America."

The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern colonies which
took their point of departure from Virginia, is almost wholly of this
historical and descriptive kind. A great part of it is concerned with
the internal affairs of the province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in
1676, one of the most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary
annals, and of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them
anonymous, and only rescued {331} from a manuscript condition a hundred
years after the event. Another part is concerned with the explorations
of new territory. Such were the "Westover Manuscripts," left by
Colonel William Byrd, who was appointed in 1729 one of the
commissioners to fix the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina,
and gave an account of the survey in his _History of the Dividing
Line_, which was only printed in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the most
brilliant figures of colonial Virginia, and a type of the Old Virginia
gentleman. He had been sent to England for his education, where he was
admitted to the bar of the Middle Temple, elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society, and formed an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl
of Orrery. He held many offices in the government of the colony, and
founded the cities of Richmond and Petersburg. His estates were large,
and at Westover--where he had one of the finest private libraries in
America--he exercised a baronial hospitality, blending the usual
profusion of plantation life with the elegance of a traveled scholar
and "picked man of countries." Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in
literature. His _History of the Dividing Line_ is written with a
jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, and which gives to
the painful journey through the wilderness the air of a holiday
expedition. Similar in tone were his diaries of _A Progress to the
Mines_ and _A Journey to the Land of Eden_ in North Carolina.

{332} The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverley, "a
native and inhabitant of the place," whose History of Virginia was
printed at Londo