In depicting the society of Virginia during this period, we must get what glimpses we can from not very promising sources. The spirit which despised literature and schools was in the end dispelled, in part at least, but it was at this time dominant enough to prevent the writing of books; and consequently the light thrown upon social life by literature is wanting almost entirely. The Virginians were apparently not letter-writers and diarists, as the New Englanders were, and while we have a wealth of correspondence in Massachusetts to help us comprehend the habits of living, we find little or nothing in Virginia. We meet, indeed, with some letters of the Byrds[693] and the Fontaines,[694] and the official correspondence of Spotswood and Dinwiddie; but the latter touch only in a casual way upon the habits of living. A few descriptive and political tracts, like Hugh Jones’ _Present State_,[695] give us small glimpses. Later Virginia writers like Bishop Meade[696] and Dr. Philip Slaughter,[697] have gathered up whatever of tradition has floated down in family gossip; and Foote[698] and Esten Cooke[699] have drawn the picture from what sources they could command, as Irving has in his _Life of Washington_.[700] The most elaborate survey of the subject, with philosophic impulses, has been made by Eben Greenough Scott in his _Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies of America_ (New York, 1882),[701] in which he contrasts the manners of the lowland aristocracy with those of the farmers of the valley and with the wilder life of the frontiers.[702] The most elaborate composite of data derived from every source is the chapter on “Virginia in 1765,” in Henry Cabot Lodge’s _Short History of the English Colonies_, in which he depends very largely on the survival of manners in the days when Burnaby, Anburey, Robin, Smyth, Brissot de Warville, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and Weld travelled in the country,—material which has the great disadvantage of being derived from chance observation, with more or less of generalization based on insufficient instances, as Dr. Dwight has pointed out in the case of Weld at least.[703] CHAPTER V. THE CAROLINAS. BY PROFESSOR WILLIAM J. RIVERS.