Chapter Chapter 2 of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

I asked when our proceedings should be made public: She said They were like to be no more public than they were already. Offer'd me no Wine that I remember. I rose up at 11 a'clock to come away, saying I would put on my coat, She offer'd not to help me. I pray'd her that Juno might light me home, she open'd the Shutter, and said it was pretty light abroad; Juno was weary and gone to bed. So I came home by Starlight as well as I could. At my first coming in, I gave Sarah five shillings. I writ Mr. Eyre his name in his book with the date October 21, 1720. It cost me 8.^s Jehovah jireh."

Sarah Kemble Knight, 1666-1727.

Among the most interesting personal narratives of this period is the Journal of Sarah K. Knight, which contains a lively account of a journey from Boston to New York made by this adventurous lady in 1704. Madam Knight was thirty-eight years of age -- a native of Boston. She made the trip on horseback and was five days on the way between Boston and New Haven; the distance between New Haven and New York occupied two days. The story is eloquent of the inconvenience and peril to which colonial travelers were subject, but the charm of the narrative is due to the vivacious personality of its author, and to her abounding sense of humor which broadly illuminates the oddities of human nature encountered in the wilderness.

To the student, as to the general reader, these bright and lively narratives of actual life are far more attractive than essays in more formal history; in their power to revive the past they are far superior. The South as well as the North is represented thus in this same period.

William Byrd, 1674-1744.

Born on a beautiful estate at Westover, Virginia, William Byrd became one of the most prominent and useful of those who served that colony at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was also its wittiest writer if not its most accomplished scholar. His education he received in England -- as was customary with the youth of the South -- and he was admitted to the English bar. After further travel in Europe, he returned to Virginia. He filled various official positions and became famed as the master of Westover, where he maintained a princely hospitality. In 1729, his duties assigned him to an expedition which fixed the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina; and a narrative of this expedition Byrd wrote in the form of a journal. It was not until 1841, however, that the Westover manuscripts were published. The History of the Dividing Line, as its author called it, is a picturesque and racy account of an interesting experience. It was a laborious task -- this of running the line of division from a point on the coast six hundred miles westward through a country wild and almost unknown, and which traversed the Great Dismal Swamp. In the gayest of spirits, the journal records the daily experiences of the expedition, vivaciously describing the locality, with its denizens both wild and tame. An historical sketch of Virginia is included in the narrative wherein Byrd humorously sets off the shortcomings of the first colonists -- "about a hundred men, most of them reprobates of good families." Another journal entitled A Progress to the Mines contains the account of a trip taken in 1733.

Histories.

There was no lack of historical writings in the colonies during this period of their growth. A young Virginian, Robert Beverley, studying in London, was shown the text of a work upon the British Empire in America; and was so disturbed by its inaccuracies that he himself prepared a History of Virginia which was honest and readable. Beverley's history was published in London in 1705, and again, enlarged and revised, in 1722. Rev. William Stith (1689-1755), president of William and Mary College,¹ published in 1747 his first part of The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia, bringing his narrative down only to 1624. He never carried the work further. It is based directly upon "the excellent but confused materials" of Captain John Smith, of whom Stith adds loyally: "I take him to have been a very honest man and a strenuous lover of truth."