Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v1.djvu/36

10 and settled social conditions to the older English colonies. With these went the leisure and comfort which prepare a community for the conscious enjoyment of literature. These changing circumstances are reflected in the keen observations and amusing descriptions preserved by one of the sprightliest of New England matrons, Madame Sarah Knight. During the winter of 1704-5, Mrs. Knight was obliged to go to New York to attend to some business affairs. The trip from Boston followed the shore line, and was accomplished as expeditiously as her energetic nature, bored by the humdrum happenings along the way, could hurry it along, but five months elapsed before she regained her own fireside and warming pan. From the first stopping place, where she found the other guests “tyed by the Lipps to a pewter engine,” and the next day's guide, whose “shade on his Hors resembled a Globe on a Gate post,” there was scarcely a stage of her journey which did not provide its subject for entertaining comment.

An equal appreciation of the fact that mileage and food are not the only things worth recording by those who go abroad gives permanent value to the diaries kept by the second William Byrd of Westover in 1732 and 1733, when he followed the course of Edward Bland in searching for the likeliest Virginian land-holdings. Byrd was a model for all who journey in company, for he “broke not the Laws of Travelling by uttering the least Complaint” at inopportune torrents or “an impertinent Tooth. . . that I cou'd not grind a Biscuit but with much deliberation and presence of mind.” He “contriv'd to get rid of this troublesome Companion by cutting a Caper,” with a stout cord connecting the tooth and the snag of a log. “This new way of Tooth-drawing, being so silently and deliberately perform'd, both surprized and delighted all that were present, who cou'd not guess what I was going about.”

Byrd has been made known for his “happy proficiency in polite and varied learning.” He was not peculiar, however, among the gentlemen of his generation for a style which shows an acquaintance with what is recognized as literature. Most of the people who possessed inherited wealth and established position were able to spell correctly, and they obeyed the laws of English grammar. Many of Byrd's contemporaries in the New World could not do either of these things, and it has come to be the