The possibility that incidents arising out of Virginian colonization may have turned Shakespeare's attention to "the still vex'd Bermoothes" and given him suggestions for one of his great plays lends added interest to Strachey's True Repertory. But, aside from Shakespeare, this has an interest of its own. It has the Anglo-Saxon touch in depicting the wrath of the sea, and it shows the character of the early American colonists who braved a wrath like this. [Illustration: GEORGE SANDYS] POETRY IN THE VIRGINIA COLONY.--GEORGE SANDYS (1577-1644), during his stay in the colony as its treasurer, translated ten books of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, sometimes working by the light of a pine knot. This work is rescued from the class of mere translation by its literary art and imaginative interpretation, and it possesses for us an additional interest because of its nativity amid such surroundings. Two lines telling how Philemon "Took down a flitch of bacon with a prung, That long had in the smoky chimney hung," show that his environment aided him somewhat in the translation. He himself says of this version that it was "bred in the new world, whereof it cannot but participate, especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light, instead of the muses." He was read by both Dryden and Pope in their boyhood, and the form of their verse shows his influence. The only original poem which merits our attention in the early Virginian colony was found soon after the Revolutionary War in a collection of manuscripts, known as the _Burwell Papers_. This poem is an elegy on the death of Nathaniel Bacon (1676), a young Virginian patriot and military hero, who resisted the despotic governor, Sir William Berkeley. It was popularly believed that Bacon's mysterious death was due to poison. An unknown friend wrote the elegy in defense of Bacon and his rebellion. These lines from that elegy show a strength unusual in colonial poetry:-- "Virginia's foes, To whom, for secret crimes, just vengeance owes Deserved plagues, dreading their just desert, Corrupted death by Paracelsian art, Him to destroy . . . Our arms, though ne'er so strong, Will want the aid of his commanding tongue, Which conquered more than Caesar." DESCRIPTIONS OF VIRGINIA.--ROBERT BEVERLY, clerk of the Council of Virginia, published in London in 1705 a _History and Present State of Virginia_. This is today a readable account of the colony and its people in the first part of the eighteenth century. This selection shows that in those early days Virginians were noted for what has come to be known as southern hospitality:--