Brief reference has been made to the educational indifference of the southern settlers. As has already been shown, Governor Berkeley thanked God that there were no schools in Virginia.[233] To the rich planter this was not so disastrous, as his sons were either provided with a tutor or sent to England. But this absence of schools for the small freeholders presented a great difficulty. Certainly in the Carolinas the lack of education was not so marked, for there, as society was more urban, the opportunities of a school training were more numerous. "Their cohabiting in a town has drawn to them ingenious people of most sciences, whereby they have tutors amongst them that educate their youth _à la mode_."[234] South Carolina was particularly famous for its educational advantages, and in one year there were no fewer than four hundred educational advertisements in the _South Carolina Gazette_. Although William and Mary College in Virginia was founded by Blair at the end of the seventeenth century, it remained for many years nothing more than a rather superior boarding school. In Philadelphia there was some attempt to instruct the young, not only in several German and Moravian seminaries, but also, after 1698, in the Penn Charter School. New York had its first Church of England School in 1704, but it was not until fifty years later that King's College, afterwards Columbia College, was established. A college was founded in New Jersey in 1746, but two years later Governor Belcher complained that "they are a very rustical people and deficient in learning."[235] Owing to the energies of the indefatigable Benjamin Franklin an academy was built in Philadelphia in 1750 in which the Quaker youth of the colony had the greater part of their training. There can be no doubt that the lack of education in the southern and middle colonies was reflected in the absence of any vigorous literary development. Virginia is easily first in its possession of three writers of repute: Robert Beverley, who wrote the history of his own colony; or the Rev. William Stith, whose work though fragmentary is never dull, and "might have been produced by a learned, leisurely, and somewhat pompous English clergyman";[236] or finally, Colonel William Byrd, a man of education and wealth, who has left on record a witty and interesting account of his travels. New York was not without two famous names, those of William Smith, author of _The History of New York_, and Cadwallader Colden, who has left to posterity a chronicle of the Five Nations, filled with picturesque descriptions. Pennsylvania, unlike the other colonies, has to revere the name, not of an historian, but a poet and tragedian, in Thomas Godfrey, whose short life lasted only from 1736 to 1763.