Various were the employments by which the calmness of life was relieved.
George Sandys, an idle man, who had been a great traveller, and who did
not remain in America, a poet, whose verse was tolerated by Dryden
and praised by Isaac Walton, beguiled the ennui of his seclusion by
translating the whole of Ovid's Metamorphoses. To the man of leisure the
chase furnished a perpetual resource. It was not long before the horse
was multiplied in Virginia; and to improve that noble animal was early
an object of pride, soon to be favored by legislation. Speed was
especially valued, and "the planters pace" became a proverb....
* * * * *
=_130_=. CONTRAST OF ENGLISH AND FRENCH COLONIZATION IN AMERICA.
In Asia, the victories of Olive at Plassy, of Coote at the Wandewash,
and of Watson and Pococke on the Indian seas, had given England the
undoubted ascendency in the East Indies, opening to her suddenly the
promise of untold treasures and territorial acquisitions without end. In
America, the Teutonic race, with its strong tendency to individuality
and freedom, was become the master from the Gulf of Mexico to the Poles;
and the English tongue, which but a century and a half before had for
its entire world a part only of two narrow islands on the outer verge
of Europe, was now to spread more widely than any that had ever given
expression to human thought.
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