His personal character is seen on the face of his public career.

He was impulsive and subject to fits of passion, or, as the old writers say, "of a precipitate disposition." Bacon came near being the Virginia Cromwell.

Though he never wholly redeemed his adopted country from tyranny, he put the miscreant Berkeley to flight.

On that May night in 1676, Bacon was at his Curles plantation, just below the old city of Henricus, living quietly on his estate with his beautiful young wife Elizabeth.

He had another estate in what is now the suburbs of the present city of Richmond, which is to-day known as "Bacon's Quarter Branch." His servants and overseers lived here, and he could easily go thither in a morning's journey on his favorite dapple gray, or by rowing seven miles around the Dutch Gap peninsula, could make the journey in his barge.