agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation.” Williams apostrophized it as Virginia the fortunate, the incomparable, the garden of the world! which, although covered with a natural grove, yet was of an aspect so delightful and attractive, that the most melancholy eye could not look upon it “without contentment, nor be contented without admiration.” “For exactness of temperature, goodness of soil, variety of staples, and capability of receiving whatever else is produced in any part of the world, Virginia,” he remarks, “gives the right hand of preëminence to no province under heaven.”[1] “Where nature is so amiable in its naked kind,” asks the author of Nova Britannia, “what may we not expect from it in Virginia when it is assisted by human industry, and when both art and nature shall join to give the best content to men and all other creatures?”[2] “I have travailed,” said a leading member of the London Company, “by land over eighteen several kingdoms and yet all of them, in my minde, come farr short to Virginia.”[3]
Such in part was the testimony as to the general beauty and fertility of Virginia in its original condition. Whatever exaggeration may have entered into the descriptions of the first adventurers, or the persons who immediately followed them, is to be attributed either to a desire to gratify the love of the wonderful, which prevailed to an unusual degree in that enterprising age, or to promote the interests of the Colony by encouraging a larger immigration of Englishmen. The extent of this exaggeration has been a subject of critical discussion with a number of modern writers, who have been predisposed to entertain
