3

2

that he himself said, half in pride, half in complaint, "they have acted my fatal tragedies upon the stage and racked my relations at their pleasure." Even then there were not wanting those who suspected the fidelity of his narratives, and who accused him of adorning his heroic anecdotes with exploits which he had wrought only in imagination. "Envy hath taxed me," he says, "to have writ too much and done too little." Thomas Fuller, in his "Worthies of England," first published thirty-one years after Captain Smith's death, gives perhaps the cool afterthought of many of the Captain's contemporaries, in these contemptuous and delicately cutting words: "From the Turks in Europe he passed to the pagans in America, where . . . such his perils, preservations, dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men above belief, to some beyond truth. Yet have we two witnesses to attest them, the prose and the pictures, both in his own book; and it soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds, that he alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them." Probably it was this base incredulity of his contemporaries, this hard historical Sadduceeism, that Captain Smith and his immediate champions meant to designate by the words "envy," and "detraction," which meet us in their allusions to the reception then given to his writings. A namesake of the author, one N. Smith, thus bravely steps forward as his defender:

"Sith thou, the man deserving of these ages,

Much pain hast ta'en for this our kingdom's good,
In climes unknown, 'mongst Turkës and salvages,

T' enlarge our bounds, though with thy loss of blood,
Hence damn'd Detraction-stand not in our way!
Envy itself will not the truth gainsay."4

It is quite plain that while the weak spot in Captain Smith's character, his love of telling large stories, was sus

3

"Epistle Dedicatory" in "True Travels."

"Ibid.

Edition of 1840, I. 275, 276. *Capt. J. Smith's “Gen. Hist.” I. 246.

pected by many of his contemporaries, he nevertheless had among the best of them stanch and admiring friends. Sir Robert Cotton, the Earls of Pembroke, of Lindsay, and of Dover, the Duchess of Lenox, and Lord Hunsdon, were those in the upper spheres of society whom he could publicly name as his patrons and friends. Among the writers of commendatory verses prefixed and affixed to his books, are such eminent persons as Samuel Purchas, George Wither, and John Donne; and nearly all of these writers, whether now famous or obscure, apply to him terms of homage and endearment. Donne calls him "brave Smith;" Richard James calls him "dear noble Captain;' Ed. Jordan exclaims:

"Good men will yield thee praise; then slight the rest;

'Tis best, praise-worthy, to have pleased the best ;"1

1

while an anonymous writer, after reciting the names of the great explorers, Columbus, Cabot, Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, Drake, Gosnold, and others, says:

"Though these be gone and left behind a name,

Yet Smith is here to anvil out a piece

To after ages and eternal fame,

That we may have the golden Jason's fleece.

He, Vulcan-like, did forge a true plantation,

And chained their kings to his immortal glory,
Restoring peace and plenty to the nation,

Regaining honor to this worthy story." 2

After all the abatements which a fair criticism must make from the praise of Captain John Smith either as a doer or as a narrator, his writings still make upon us the impression of a certain personal largeness in him, magnanimity, affluence, sense, and executive force. Over all his personal associates in American adventure he seems to tower, by the natural loftiness and reach of the perception. with which he grasped the significance of their vast enter

1 In Capt. J. Smith's "Gen. Hist."

Ibid. 61.

prise, and the means to its success. As a writer his merits are really great-clearness, force, vividness, picturesque and dramatic energy, a diction racy and crisp. He had the faults of an impulsive, irascible, egotistic, and imaginative nature; he sometimes bought human praise at too high a price; but he had great abilities in word and deed; his nature was upon the whole generous and noble; and during the first two decades of the seventeenth century he did more than any other Englishman to make an American nation and an American literature possible.

CHAPTER III.

VIRGINIA: OTHER EARLY WRITERS.

I.-George Percy of Northumberland-His worthiness--His graphic sketches of the brightness and gloom of their first year in America. II.-William Strachey-His terrible voyage and wreck with Sir Thomas Gates-His book descriptive of it and of the state of the colony in Virginia-Some germs of Shakespeare's Tempest-Strachey's wonderful picture of a storm at sea.

III.-Alexander Whitaker, the devoted Christian missionary-His life and death and memory in Virginia-His appeal to England in "Good News from Virginia."

IV. John Pory-His coming to Virginia-His previous career-A cosmopolite in a colony-His return to England-His amusing sketches of Indian character-The humors and consolations of pioneer life along the James River.

V.--George Sandys-His high personal qualities and his fine genius-His literary services before coming to America-Michael Drayton's exhortation to entice the Muses to Virginia—Sandys's fidelity to his literary vocation amid calamity and fatigue-His translation of Ovid-Its relation to poetry and scholarship in the new world-Passages from it-The story of Philomela-His poetic renown.

I.

IN that little colony of carliest Americans, seated at Jamestown, and for more than twenty years struggling against almost every menace of destruction from without and within, were several other writers who have some claim to our notice. One of these was George Percy. Every slight glimpse we get of him through the chinks of contemporary reference tends to convince us that the uncommon respect in which he was held by his associates was rendered to him quite as much because he was a modest, brave, and honorable man, as because he was a brother

of the great Earl of Northumberland. He composed a "Discourse of the Plantations of the Southern Colony in Virginia by the English," of which, however, only a fragment is preserved—the fragment occupying six folio pages in Purchas's "Pilgrims." The portion of his book thus preserved relates the history of the colony from its departure out of England down to September, 1607; and is written in that style of idiomatic and nervous English prose which seems to have been the birthright of so many active Englishmen in the Elizabethan age. His descriptions of the beauty and fertility of Virginia as it appeared to the sea-sad eyes of the colonists in that happy month of their arrival, throw by contrast a deeper gloom upon the picture which he soon has to paint of the miseries besetting their first summer in Virginia-a summer which dragged over them slowly its horrible trail of homesickness, discord, starvation, pestilence, and Indian hostility. "Our men were destroyed with cruel diseases, as swellings, flixes, burning fevers, and by wars; and some departed suddenly. But for the most part they died of mere famine. There were never Englishmen left in a foreign country in such misery as we were, in this new discovered Virginia. We watched every three nights lying on the bare cold ground, what weather soever came; warded all the next day which brought our men to be most feeble wretches. Our food was but a small can of barley sod in water to five men a day; our drink cold water taken out of the river, which was at a flood very salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men. Thus we lived for the space of five months in this miserable distress, not having five able men to man our bulwarks upon any occasion. If it had not pleased God to put a terror in the savages' hearts, we had all perished by those wild and cruel pagans, being in that weak estate as we were; our men night and day groaning in every corner of the fort most pitiful to hear. If there were any conscience in men, it would make their hearts to bleed to hear the