The character of the first settlers of Maryland and Virginia is known to have been very different from that of the Pilgrim Fathers—as opposite as the idle, gay, and dissolute cavalier to the stern, laborious, and self-denying Puritan. Their purpose in seeking the shores of the Western World was also widely different from that of the first settlers of New England—the object of the latter being spiritual liberty; the end of the former, material wealth. And their history since the first settlement of the country has been as broadly diverse. The children of the Pilgrim Fathers have reached the highest seats in the temples of Fame and Fortune—the descendants of the first aristocratic settlers of Maryland and Virginia have seen themselves outstripped in the path of success and honor by the children of the very menials of their father’s house. This is emphatically the case in Maryland. Among the friends and partizans of Lord Baltimore, who sought with him an Eldorado among the rolling hills and lovely vales, and beside the broad and beautiful rivers of Maryland, came many younger sons of the decayed old English nobility and gentry, who thought out of the wealth of the New World to found a name and a family here, that should rival, in power and splendor, the house from which they sprang. They seemed to overlook the fact that this coveted wealth was as yet unreclaimed from the wilderness—that nothing but energy, labor, and perseverance could receive and appropriate it; and even if at first they had observed this, it would have availed them little, for unlike the Pilgrim Fathers, they were deplorably destitute of these natural and necessary qualifications for success in a new and unsubdued world.