It would have been impossible to make John Smith a Puritan, but an ameliorated Puritan might easily have become a John Smith. It is worth while to recall his work and that of his fellow colonists, if only to note the wide and immediate departure of thought in the northern and southern colonies, even where the Puritan element entered in, nor can we understand Anne Bradstreet, without a thought of the forces at work in the new country, unconscious but potent causes of all phases of literary life in that early time.
The Virginia colonist had more knowledge of the world and less knowledge of himself, introspection, or any desire for it, being no part of his mental constitution or habit.
Intellectually, he demanded a spherical excellence, easier then than now, and attained by many a student of that day, and to this Captain John aspired, one at least of his contemporaries giving proof of faith that he had attained it in lines written on him and his book on the history of Virginia and New England:
"Like Cæsar, now thou writ'st what thou hast done.
These acts, this book, will live while there's a sun."
The history is picturesque, and often amusing. As a writer he was always "racy, terse, fearless," but, save to the special student, there is little value to the present student, unless he be a searcher after the spirit that moved not only the man, but, through him, the time he moulded. For such reader will still be felt "the impression of a certain personal largeness . . . magnanimity, affluence, sense and executive
