But Virginia was originally settled—to a very large extent—by the offspring of the old Norman chivalry, by the cavaliers—the descendants of the proudest, most warlike, most chivalrous, heroic, and enterprising, and, at the same time, most tyrannical and oppressive aristocracy the world has ever seen. Those who belong to the race—the same species—of course will, under the same circumstances, manifest the same qualities, and therefore, if at any time the child of the princely Plantagenet or lordly Warwick had been exchanged in its cradle with the “base” progeny of some Saxon churl, who fed and kenneled with their hounds, the latter would have grown up with all the pride and chivalry, and princely bravery common to the former. Nevertheless, a class, an aristocracy, a privileged order, forms sentiments, ideas, etc., and transmits its traditions, rules, etc., to its descendants, that may, for centuries perhaps, preserve their integrity. Even in our social every-day life, and changing society, we often see families transmitting their family usages, habitudes, modes of thought as well as action, for several generations, and with only slight departures from the family model left by some original or venerated ancestor. Aristocracies, however, usually destroy themselves by the very means they resort to to preserve their ascendency over the great body of the people. In order to preserve the respect, the awe, the continued belief of the vulgar mass in their seeming superiority, they must avoid the populace and intermarry with their order, and the more completely this is done, the more they become a close corporation as it were, and violate the laws of consanguinity, the more rapidly they are deteriorated and fall below the general average of the people. The Northmen, the robust and enterprising fishermen of the Baltic, the fillibusters and pirates of the Northern Seas, invaded France and conquered Normandy, and Rolla and his roving horde of followers threatened to overrun Paris, and indeed the whole kingdom. They finally settled down in Normandy, from which, at a later date, they emerged into Italy, conquered Naples, the island of Sicily, and for a long time threatened an invasion of the Oriental World, which could hardly have resisted such an indomitable race of men. A Duke—a bastard Duke of Normandy, at that time laid claim to the crown of England, and with forty thousand followers landed in that country, and in a single battle so completely demolished the “Anglo-Saxons” and Anglo-Saxonism, so much boasted of in these days, that the former have remained slaves ever since, and the latter was so utterly annihilated that it disappeared for ever on that fatal day at Hastings. Then, for the first time, the Normans assumed the distinct form of an aristocracy or privileged order.