Before 1607
Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare had written, and before 1620 the King
James version of the _Bible_ had been produced. England had, therefore, a
wonderful literature before her colonies came to America. They were the
heirs of all that the English race had previously accomplished; and they
brought to these shores an Elizabethan initiative, ingenuity, and
democratic spirit.
The Virginia colony was founded, as colonies usually are, for a commercial
reason. The Virginians and the other southern colonists lived more by
agriculture, were more widely scattered, had fewer schools, more slaves,
and less town life than the New Englanders. Under the influence of a
commanding clergy, common schools, and the stimulus of town life, the New
England colony produced more literature.
The chief early writers of Virginia are: (1) Captain John Smith, who
described the country and the Indians, and gave to literature the story of
Pocahontas, thereby disclosing a new world to the imagination of writers;
(2) William Strachey, who outranks contemporary colonial writers in
describing the wrath of the sea, and who may even have furnished a
suggestion to Shakespeare for _The Tempest_; (3) two poets, (a) George
Sandys, who translated part of Ovid, and (b) the unknown author of the
elegy on Nathaniel Bacon; and (4) Robert Beverly and William Byrd, who gave
interesting descriptions of early Virginia.
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