Every historian of Virginia commemorates the marriage of Rolfe to the Indian Pocahontas with approbation. In the year 1616, the Indian wife, instructed in the English language, and bearing the English name of Rebecca, the very first Christian of her nation, in company with Dale, who had resigned his office of governor, sailed with her husband for England. The daughter of the wilderness possessed the mild elements of female loveliness, rendered still more beautiful by the child-like simplicity with which her education in the savannahs of the New World had invested her. In London she had the pleasure of meeting with her old friend, John Smith, and by him she was recommended to the notice of the Queen. She was caressed at court, and admired in the city. Nevertheless, so absurd were the prevailing notions at that time regarding royalty in England, that Rolfe narrowly escaped being called to account, because he, a commoner, had married a princess! “As a wife and a young mother, Pocahontas was exemplary; she had been able to contrast the magnificence of European life with the freedom of the western forest, and now, as she was preparing to return to America, at the age of twenty-two, she fell a victim to the English climate, saved, as by the hand of mercy, from beholding the extermination of the tribes whence she sprung; leaving a spotless name, and surviving in memory under the form of perpetual youth.” The Bollands and the Randolphs, two of the most distinguished families of Virginia, are proud to trace their descent from this marriage. The portrait of Pocahontas, which is still preserved among her descendants, represents her in the costume which was worn by the higher class of English in the time of Elizabeth; but the stiff Indian plaits of hair which hang down her cheeks from beneath her head-dress betray her descent. The countenance has an affecting expression of child-like goodness and innocence, and the eyes have a melancholy charm. The portrait was taken in 1616, and bears the inscription, _Matoakeals. Rebecca potentiss. Princ. Powhatan Imp. Virginæ._ The consequence of this alliance was peace with the Indians, not alone with the Powhatans, but with the powerful Chickahominies. The Indians wished the two nations to blend in one, and proposed more general intermarriage, but the English, who despised the Indians as savages, and abhorred them as heathens, would not promote such union, and by degrees the old animosities were revived.