[131] "Fauquier was then a frontier county ... far in advance of the ordinary reach of compact population." (Story, in Dillon, iii, 331; also see New York Review (1838), iii, 333.) Even a generation later (1797), La Rochefoucauld, writing from personal investigation, says (iii, 227-28): "There is no state so entirely destitute of all means of public education as Virginia."
[132] See Binney, in Dillon, iii, 285.
[133] Story, in Dillon, iii, 330.
[134] Marshall to Story, July 31, 1833; Story, ii, 150.
[135] See infra, chaps. VII and VIII.
[136] "A taste for reading is more prevalent [in Virginia] among the gentlemen of the first class than in any other part of America; but the common people are, perhaps, more ignorant than elsewhere." (La Rochefoucauld, iii, 232.) Other earlier and later travelers confirm this statement of this careful French observer.
[137] Story thinks that Thomas Marshall, at this time, owned Milton, Shakespeare, and Dryden. (Dillon, iii, 331.) This is possible. Twenty years later, Chastellux found Milton, Addison, and Richardson in the parlor of a New Jersey inn; but this was in the comparatively thickly settled country adjacent to Philadelphia. (Chastellux, 159.)
[138] Story, in Dillon, iii, 331, and Binney, in ib., 283; Hist. Mag., iii, 166.
[139] Lang: History of English Literature, 384; and see Gosse: History of Eighteenth Century Literature, 131; also, Traill: Social England, V, 72; Stephen: Alexander Pope, 62; and see Cabot to Hamilton, Nov. 29, 1800; Cabot: Lodge, 299.
[140] Binney, in Dillon, iii, 283-84; Washington's Diary; MS., Lib. Cong.