During his brief stint as a soldier, Bagby became ill and was dropped off his Manassas-bound troop train to spend a night at the Gordonsville Exchange Hotel: "The bathing over-how I enjoyed it! I dismissed the [water] boy, put on a night-shirt that had been dying for three weeks-at least I had been dying for it-blew out the light, a wood fire was on the hearth, and got into bed. The sweet languor of fever was on me, the warmth had softened my whole nature, bodily and spiritually, my skin began to breathe once more, the odor of the clean pillow-cases was more delicious than roses or lilies, and as I stretched myself out at full length I actually tasted the clean sheets clear down to my toes....I blessed [Doctor] Chalmers for advising me to stop, blessed the boy, blessed M'hundrer [Omohundro, hotel proprietor], the hot water, the pillows, the sheets, the whole world, and went to sleep, vowing that never again while life lasted would I sleep in anything but clean sheets, be the consequences what they might to the Southern Confederacy." (From "The Unrenowned Warrior.")

            From an 1877 introductory note to a published lecture: "Doubtless the picture here drawn of Virginia as she was is idealized. Purposely so. Not for a moment could any Virginian say that there was nothing amiss in the old order. Alas! There is much amiss in every structure, old or new. Educated at the North, I was perhaps more keenly alive to the defects of our system than almost any Virginian of my time. And so long as the good Commonwealth lived I did not fail to mix in every panegyric I wrote-and there were several-a full proportion of good-natured satire....But our Mother is dead, and much may be pardoned in an eulogy which would be inexcusable were the subject living. I ask no man's pardon for what must seem to a stranger a most exaggerated estimate of my State and its people. In simple truth and beyond question there was in our Virginia country life a beauty, a simplicity, a purity, an uprightness, a cordial and lavish hospitality, warmth and grace which shine in the lens of memory with a charm that passes all language at my command. It is gone with the social structure that gave it birth, and were I great, I would embalm it in the amber of such prose and verse as has not been written since John Milton laid down his pen. Only greatness can fitly do it."