In the year 1798 John Davis came to America. He had been very much of a traveler, had lived in the East Indies, had crossed the equator several times and doubled the Cape of Good Hope more than once. Davis came from Salisbury, in England. He deserves a place in the biographical dictionaries, but is not found there. Having been a sailor before the mast for eleven years, he became a desultory man of letters, of considerable literature, who paid his way while in this country by potboiling for New York and Philadelphia booksellers and by teaching in South Carolina and Virginia.[M] He brought with him across the Atlantic a library of 300 volumes, French, Latin and English. These books he read. For statistics, commerce, land speculations, Davis cared nothing whatever. He was an impressionist and not to be disregarded as a poet. His work, therefore, is distinct among these early travels which are usually records of fact as fact, and as such are extremely valuable. However a man sees, let him write. Thomas Jefferson, who was pleased to accept the dedication to him of this volume, supposed that it would be of a statistical sort. “Should you in your journeyings have been led to remark on the same objects on which I gave crude notes some years ago, I shall be happy to see them confirmed or corrected by a more accurate observer,” wrote President Jefferson from Monticello. Davis accepted the acceptance and published a book as little like the “Notes on Virginia” as any book could well be. The author had read Horace and believed as that poet did that his work was going to last. “That this volume will regale curiosity while man continues to be influenced by his senses and affections, I have little doubt,” was the statement of John Davis in his preface. “It will be recurred to with equal interest on the banks of the Thames and those of the Ohio. There is no man who is not pleased in being told by another what he thought of the world and what the world thought of him.” There is a good deal of truth in both the particular and the general observation. We have not yet taken the time to review our history with much care. Whenever that is done, John Davis, of Salisbury, citizen of the world, more or less, should find readers again after a hundred years.