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Rh acts can fulfill their prayers. The brilliant men who had passed from the scene had no successors. The few malcontents were silenced by a law which made "even the first thrust of the pressman's lever a crime," and until 1729 there was neither printing nor desire for printing in any general sense. The point where our literature began had become apparently its burial-place; the historians and poets and students of an earlier generation were not only unheeded but forgotten, and a hundred years of intellectual barrenness, with another hundred, before even partial recovery could be apparent, were the portion of Virginia and all the states she influenced or controlled. No power could have made it otherwise. "Had much literature been produced there, would it not have been a miracle? The units of the community isolated; little chance for mind to kindle mind; no schools; no literary institutions, high or low; no public libraries; no printing-press; no intellectual freedom; no religious freedom; the forces of society tending to create two great classes—a class of vast land-owners, haughty, hospitable, indolent, passionate, given to field sports and politics; and a class of impoverished white plebeians and black serfs; these constitute a situation out of which may be evolved country gentlemen, loud-lunged and jolly fox-hunters, militia heroes, men of boundless domestic heartiness and social grace, astute and imperious politicians, fiery orators, and, by and by, here and there, perhaps after awhile, a few amateur literary men—but no literary class, and almost no literature."

The Northern Colony had known strange changes