Garden's

Sermons

(1740)

the great evangelist, George Whitefield, who had come to America to carry on a revival. In 1740 Garden wrote two sermons, entitled Regeneration and The Testimony of the Spirit, and based on the text: "They who have turned the world upside down have come hither also." He hammered Whitefield most unmercifully. During the same year he wrote six heated letters addressed to Whitefield, and in 1743 he reviewed the whole affair in a long letter to a friend. Garden was a confident and sharp controversialist; indeed, in the New England States, with a people more interested in religious affairs, he doubtless would have shone brightly. He was not a man of flattery. "As to the state of religion in this province," he wrote, "it is bad enough, God knows. Rome and the Devil have contrived to crucify her 'twixt two thieves-Infidelity and Enthusiasm. The former, alas, too often still prevails; but as to the latter, thanks to God, it is greatly subsided, and even at the point of vanishing away. We had here trances, visions, and revelations, both 'mongst blacks and whites, in abundance.

Bad also is the present state of the poor orphanhouse in Georgia,—that land of lies, and from which we have no truth, but what they can neither disguise nor conceal. The whole colony is accounted here one great lie from the beginning to this day; and orphan-house, you know, is a part of the whole-a scandalous bubble."

We close the second period of Southern Literature. No longer do the authors write books for England; they have readers at home, and that home is America. Local history and local pride have been created, and there is heard now the voice of a people

that feels itself to be different in environments, inclinations, and tendencies from the inhabitants of the mother country. National consciousness is created; in its wake come protest and, at last,-Revolution.

CHAPTER III

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

(1740-1810)

I

John Fiske has called the period from 1676 to 1776 a century of "political education." It was truly a time of great advance in the intellectual standing of the common people; for, whereas the rural classes of the seventeenth century thought but little and read less, their descendants of the eighteenth century were a wide-awake people, knowing the movements of the world and studying the questions of government and of general law. Among the aristocratic classes there was oftentimes a culture comparing favorably with that of the mother country. James Blair, Hugh Jones, and their followers had not labored in vain.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century the English ardor for knowledge had been cooled momentarily, but only momentarily, by the rude plentifulness of the new way of living. Popular free education had been a part of the earliest plans of the Virginia Company. In 1621 the corporation had resolved to appropriate funds for a free school, to be called the East India School, and to be established at Charles City. Then, to follow this, there was to be a university, and a fund of several thousand pounds had been given for this purpose. George Thorpe came over to manage the undertaking, but

in the fearful massacre of 1622 he perished, and with him many who were enthusiastic about the idea. Then followed the loss of power by the company, and the control of colonial affairs passed into the hands of people who cared more for American tobacco than for American education. Thus the revival in things intellectual was delayed until the coming of Blair in 1692.

By 1740, however, there was a vast improvement. Large estates, cultivated by wholesale slave labor, had come into existence, and a peculiar type of aristocratic, or, in some respects, patriarchal society was growing in Virginia. Leisure and wealth came as results. By 1777 William and Mary had developed into an embryo university, with departments of law and medicine; and year by year it was sending forth leaders of Southern thought. Fiske, in summing up the history of this ancient institution, says: "Though until lately its number of students at one time has never reached one hundred and fifty, it has given to our country fifteen senators and seventy representatives in Congress; seventeen governors of States and thirty-seven judges; three presidents of the United States:-Jefferson, Monroe, and Tyler; and the great Chief Justice Marshall. It was a noble work for America that was done by the Scotch parson, James Blair."

Art, music, and literature now gained some share of attention, and the table in the dining-room ceased to be the chief center of interest in the mansion. Good private libraries became more frequent; paintings from "the Old Country" appeared in the great rooms; and musical instruments held an honored place in not a few homes. Among the effects of a Virginia musician who died in 1755 were Handel's Acis and Galatea and Apollo's Feast, four books of the instrumental scores of Handel's oratorios, ten