Captain Smith's writings have small literary value apart from the
interest of the events which they describe and the diverting but
forcible personality which they unconsciously display. They are the
rough-hewn records of a busy man of action, whose sword was mightier
than his pen. As Smith returned to England after two years in
Virginia, and did not permanently cast in his lot with the settlement
of which he had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be
claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George Sandys, who came
to Virginia in the train of Governor Wyat, in 1621, and completed his
excellent metrical translation of Ovid on the banks of the James, in
the midst of the Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by
that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and
repose, 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 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