Virginia was a paradise with no forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones,
writing of it in 1724, considers North Carolina "the refuge of
runaways," and South Carolina "the delight of buccaneers and
pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat of true Britons and
true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well nourished "by
the plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions of
England!" We shall hear from them again. In the meantime the
witty William Byrd of Westover describes for us his amusing
survey of the Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into North
Carolina and to Governor Spotswood's iron mines, where he reads
aloud to the Widow Fleming, on a rainy autumn day, three acts of
the "Beggars' Opera," just over from London. So runs the world
away, south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints it once for all, no
doubt, in the opening chapters of "The Virginians."

To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must
turn northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in
Philadelphia, which had now outgrown Boston in population, there
was a quickened interest in education and science. But the New
Englanders were still the chief makers of books. Three great
names will sufficiently represent the age: Cotton Mather, a
prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly to the provincial
past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate intellect of
the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly the most
perfect exponent of its many-sided life.

When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard in 1678, in his
sixteenth year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes,
in fulsome Latin, as the grandson of Richard Mather and John
Cotton. This atmosphere of flattery, this consciousness of