Page:The records of the Virginia company of London - Volume 1.djvu/15



The records, and especially the Court Book, of the Virginia Company of London have long been regarded as among the most precious manuscript treasures which have found a lodgment within the United States. Not only is their inherent value as an historical source very great, as has been explained by the editor in her introduction, but a sentimental value also attaehes to them. This has a twofold origin. It arises, in the first place, from the fact that they belong at once to the romantic period of our own beginnings and to the heroic period of England's great. struggle against absolutism. The men who figure in the pages of this record were at the same time playing their parts, on the one side or the other, in the controversies which were then beginning with James I, and which were to broaden and deepen under his son till England was plunged into the agonies of the great civil war. They were contemporaries, and in vot a few cases associates, of Coke and Eliot and Hampden, of Bacon and Wentworth and Buckingham. The names of Sandys and the Ferrars stand high on the roll of patriots by which the first generation of the Stuart period is distinguished. These same men also, together with a long list of the merchants and nobles of the time, were deeply interested in discovery and colonization. As successors of Gilbert and Raleigh they were planting a new England beyond the Atlantic. About this enterprise still clung some of the spirit and memories of the Elizabethan seamen and their early struggles with Spain. In the days when Smythe and Sandys were active the prosaic age of English colonization had not yet begun. The glamour of romance, of the heroic, attaches to the founding of Virginia and Plymouth, and makes them fit subjects for the poet. By the time when the other colonies were founded the glow and inspiration had giown faint or wholly disappeared. In the Records of the Virginia Company some reflection may be seen of this early zeal, of the plans and ideals to which it gave rise. Even their pages, cast in a style which is quite unusual in records of this nature, make one realize that he is in the company of noble and earvest spirits, men who were conscious that they were engaged ina great enterprise. The Court Book itself, now that it is printed in full, will be found to be a worthy monument of English speech, as it was used at the close of the Elizabethan epoch and by contemporaries of Shakespeare and Bacon.

The fate whieh probably befell the original of this record, and the unusual steps which it became necessary to take in order to secure and preserve a copy, were natural consequences of the struggles of the time, and add still further to the interest of 5