As a picture of Virginian life at this period, we will indulge ourselves with a graphic extract from Bancroft, to whom we are already so largely obliged. “The generation now in existence was chiefly the fruit of the soil; they were children of the woods nurtured in the freedom of the wilderness, and dwelling in lonely cottages scattered along the streams. No newspaper entered their houses, no printing-press furnished them with books. They had no recreation but such as nature provides in her wilds; no education but such as parents in the desert could give to their offspring. The paths were bridleways rather than roads, and it is questionable if there was what we should call a bridge in the whole dominion. Visits were made in boats, or on horseback, through the forests; and the Virginian, travelling with his pouch of tobacco for currency, swam the river where there was neither ford nor ferry. Almost every planter was his own mechanic. The houses, for the most part, but of one story, and made of wood, often of logs, the windows closed by convenient shutters for want of glass, were sprinkled on both sides of the Chesapeake, from the Potomac to the borders of Carolina. There was hardly such a sight as a cluster of three dwellings. Jamestown was but a place of a State-house, one church and eighteen houses, occupied by about a dozen families. Till very lately the legislature assembled in the hall of an ale-house. Virginia had neither towns nor lawyers. A few of the wealthier planters, however, lived in braver state at their large plantations, and surrounded by indented servants and slaves, produced a new form of society that has sometimes been likened to the manners of the patriarchs, and sometimes to the baronial pride of feudalism.” Such was the population of Virginia. Hospitable and luxurious in the simplicity of their free, unconventional life; loving liberty, not so much as a sublime principle of human elevation and enlightenment, but as the very element of their joyous existence; cherishing a sentiment of loyalty and attachment to the old mother-country, with such traditional reverence as they would regard the head of an ancestral line; enthusiastic and impulsive, quick to revenge and keen in their sense of wrong. We shall see the effect produced on a people of this generous and mercurial character, by the oppressions of a monarch whom they had welcomed back to his throne with all the enthusiasm of their traditional loyalty. The first evidence of the Restoration perceived in Virginia was the rigorous enforcement of the Navigation Act, by which all foreign vessels were excluded from the English colonies. At the expense of 200,000 pounds of tobacco, Sir William Berkeley was sent over by the colony to remonstrate on their behalf; but Sir William employed his time in London, not on the business of the colony, but in securing to himself a share in the Great Carolina Charter, in which, as we have said, he became one of the eight proprietaries.