Virginian society, as it existed at that period, is utterly extinct.

John Randolph said it had departed before the year 1800.

Since then another century, with all its manifold changes, has wellnigh come and gone.

Most important of all, the last surviving institution of colonial Virginia has been swept away in the crash of civil war, which has opened a gulf between past and present wider and deeper than any that time alone could make.
Life and society as they existed in the Virginia of the eighteenth century seem, moreover, to have been sharply broken and ended.

We cannot trace our steps backward, as is possible in most cases, over the road by which the world has traveled since those days.