Sickness and Death

Pioneer life is all very well when the adventurer is in high health and spirits; but when sickness comes, he must be stout of heart indeed if he does not sigh for the comforts of a civilized home. The poor settlers had a sorry time of it in that first fatal summer on the banks of the James, when they breathed in malaria from the marshes and drank the germs of fever and “fluxes” in the muddy water. “If there were any conscience in men,” wrote gallant George Percy, “it would make their hearts bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men, without relief, every day and night for the space of six weeks; some departing out of the world, many times three or four in a night, in the morning their bodies trailed out of their cabins, like dogs, to be buried.”

The adventurers profited by the lesson of these troublous times; for as soon as the settlement was fairly re-established under Dale, they set to work upon a hospital. On the river opposite Henrico, they put up “a guest-house for ye sicke people, a high seat and wholesome aire,” and christened the place, Mount Malado. The chronicles are provokingly silent as to any details of this first American sanitorium. They say nothing of its arrangements, its comforts, or its conveniences. We do not know even the names of those who shared its rude shelter, or of the physicians who treated them. From time to time the mention of some doctor is interwoven with the history of the colonists, but he passes as a pale shadow, with none of the character and substance of the gallant captains, the doughty burgesses, and the tipsy parsons. Doctor Bohun, who is described as “brought up amongst the most learned Surgeons and Physitions in Netherlands,” came over and stayed with the settlers for a while, but Lord La Warre carried him off as his medical adviser to the “Western Iles,” that his Lordship’s gout might be “asswaged by the meanes of fresh dyet, especially Oranges and Limons, an undoubted remedie for that disease”; and a little later the good doctor perished in a sea-fight with Spaniards on the ship Margaret and John. Dr. Simons’ name is signed to one of the histories, but he too fades away and leaves no trace, and a Dr. Pot has survived only through honorable mention, as “our worthy physition.”

Either the country was too healthy, or the inhabitants too poor to encourage immigration among doctors, for they were few and far between, and we find men of other trades acting in the capacity of physician. There was Captain Norton, for instance, “a valiant, industrious gentleman adorned with many good qualities besides Physicke and Chirurgery, which for the publicke good, he freely imparted to all gratis, but most bountifully to y^e poore.”

It was common for barbers to combine the use of the knife with that of the razor, and for the apothecary to prescribe, as well as mix, his own drugs. Colonel Byrd writes that in Fredericksburg, “besides Col. Willis, who is the top man of the place, there are only one merchant, a tailor, a smith, an ordinary-keeper, and a lady who acts both as doctress and coffee-house keeper.” A list of prominent citizens in Baltimore in the eighteenth century, includes a barber, two carpenters, a tailor, a parson, and an inn-keeper, but no doctor; unless we reckon as such Dame Hughes and Dame Littig, who are registered as midwives.

The isolation of plantation life made it doubly difficult to depend on doctors, and as a result, each family had its own medicine-chest, and its own recipes and prescriptions handed down from generation to generation, and brought oftentimes from across the sea. Herbs played an important part in the pharmacopœia, both because they were easily obtained, and because tradition endowed them with mysterious virtues. An old medical treatise assures its readers that “Nature has stamped on divers plants legible characters to discover their uses”; that baldness may be cured by hanging-moss, and freckles by spotted plants. Ragwort, and periwinkle, and Solomon’s Seal all had their special merits; but sage was prime favorite, and its votary declares it a question how one who grows it in his garden and uses it freely can ever die. Next to ease of preparation, the prime requisite of a medicine was strength. Violent purges and powerful doses of physic or of “The Bark” were always in favor. The simple ailments of childhood were dosed with such abominations as copperas and pewter-filings, and these unhappy infants were fed on beverages of snake-root or soot-tea. One vile compound, common as it was odious, was snail pottage, made of garden shell-snails washed in small beer, mixed with earth-worms, and then fried in a concoction of ale, herbs, spices, and drugs.

Yet our ancestors knew how to brew good-tasting things. The letter book of Francis Jerdone, of Yorktown, Virginia, records under date 1746, “A receit how to make Burlington’s Universal Balsam.

Balsam Peru		1 oz.
Best Storax		2 oz.
Benjamin, impregnated with sweet Almonds		3 oz.
Alloes Succatrinx		½ oz.
Myrrh Elect		½ oz.
Purest Frankincense		½ oz.
Roots of Angelica		½ oz.
Flowers of St. John Wort		½ oz.
One pint of the best Spirit of Wine.

To be bottled up and Set in the Sun for 20 or 30 days together, to be shaken twice or thrice a day. Take about 30 drops going to bed in Tea made of pennyroyal, Balm or Speer mint.”

This prescription has the great defect of being too good, and might have a tendency to tempt the young to acquire the disease in order to be treated to the remedy. Angelic Snuff was another agreeable medicament, warranted to cure all head troubles and help the palsy, megrims, deafness, apoplexy, and gout. What a pity that only the name of this cure remains to our generation, whose megrims alone would empty so many boxes of the invaluable snuff!

The early settlers could, if they would, have learned some useful lessons in the treatment of disease from the Indians, who at least understood making the skin share the work of the stomach. A primitive, but very effective, way of treating fevers and similar ailments among the natives was by the sweating-oven. The Indian patient would creep into these mounds, under which a fire had been lighted, while the medicine-man poured on water from above, creating a mighty steam, in which the patient would continue till even Indian fortitude could hold out no longer, when he would crawl out, and, rushing down to the nearest stream, plunge headlong into its cold waters. All this process was, of course, performed amid incantations as mysterious to the whites as the phraseology of a modern physician to a savage.

This treatment was more in harmony with modern ideas than the methods which prevailed among the English. When the two Spotswood boys were sent across the sea to Eton, to school, they spent their vacations with their aunt, Mrs. Campbell, who writes to their landlady at the end of their stay: “I am very Sorry, Madam, to send them back with such bad coughs, though I have nursed Jack who was so bad that we were obliged to Bleed him, and physick him, that he is much better. I can’t judge how they got them (the coughs). My son came home with one, and has never been out of the house but once since, and these children have always laid warm, and lived constantly in the house.” These poor little victims of the coddling system would probably have recovered rapidly in the steam-bath of their native Virginia and the fresh air of her pine forests, but instead, they are sent back from one hothouse to another. “I beg,” adds their affectionate, but misguided aunt, “that they may be kept in a very warm room, and take the drops I send every night, and the pectoral drink several times a day, and that they eat no meat or drink anything but warm barley water and lemon juice, and, if Aleck increases, to get Blooded.” It is a great relief, and something of a surprise, to learn that Aleck and his brother John lived to come back to America and figure in the Revolution. Perhaps their recollections of the dosing and “blooding” they received in their youth threw additional energy into their opposition to the oppression of England.

Cupping, leeching, and all sorts of blood-letting were the chief dependence in olden times in all cases of fever. The free use of water, now so universal, would then have been thought fatal. The poor patient dreaded the doctor more than the disease, and often with reason. Anæsthetics, that best gift of science to a suffering world, were unknown, and surgery was vivisection with the victim looking on, conscious and quivering.

The doctor in the Cavalier Colonies was regarded with almost as much suspicion as the parson—as a cormorant, ready and anxious to prey on the community, and to be held in check by all the severities of the law. Virginia in 1657 passed statutes regulating surgeons’ fees. In 1680 physicians were compelled to declare under oath the value of their drugs, and the court allowed them fifty per cent advance on the cost. If any physician was found guilty of neglecting a patient, he was liable to fine and punishment.

In the eighteenth century, still stricter laws were framed, “because of surgeons, apothecaries and unskillful apprentices who exacted unreasonable fees, and loading their patients with medicine.” The fees fixed by this statute are “one shilling per mile and all medicines to be set forth in the bill.” The price for attending a common fracture is set down at two pounds, and double the sum for attending a compound fracture. A university degree entitled the practitioner to higher charges, but its possession was rare. Most doctors were trained up in the offices of older men as apprentices, pounders of drugs, and cleaners of instruments, as the old painters began by preparing paints and brushes for the master.

A modern man of science would smile at the titles of the old medical works solemnly consulted by our forbears. “A Chirurgicall Booke” sounds interesting, and “The Universall Body of Physick”; but they are not so alluring as “The Way to Health, long life and Happiness,” nor so attractive to the ignorant as “The Unlearned Keymiss.” Perhaps the struggling physicians and chirurgians who doctored by these old books and their common-sense, helped as many and harmed no more than the chemist of to-day, with his endless pharmacopœia of coal-tar products, tonics, and stimulants; or the specialist who, instead of “the Whole Body of Physick,” devotes himself wholly to a single muscle, or nerve-ganglion.

In spite of the chill of popular disfavor and of the difficulties of professional training, good and noble men worked on faithfully at the business of helping the sick and suffering in the colonies. The Maryland annals tell of a Dr. Henry Stevenson, who built him a house near the York road so elegant, that the neighbors called it “Stevenson’s Folly.” If there was any envy in their hearts, however, it changed to gratitude and admiration when the small-pox appeared in their midst, and the large-hearted doctor turned his mansion into a hospital. It is hard for us who live after the days of Jenner, to appreciate the terror of the word small-pox. In the eighteenth century pitted faces were the rule. Fathers feared to send their sons to England, so prevalent was the disease there. An old journal advertises: “Wanted, a man between twenty and thirty years of age, to be a footman and under-butler in a great family; he must be of the Church of England, and have had the small-pox in the natural way.”

This enlightened Dr. Stevenson, of Stevenson’s Folly, made Maryland familiar with the process of inoculation, which antedated vaccination. He advertises in The Maryland Gazette of 1765 that he is ready to inoculate “any gentlemen that are pleased to favor him in that way,” and that his fees are two pistoles for inoculating, and twenty shillings per week board, the average cost to each patient being £5 14s.

Ryland Randolph writes to his brother at a time when inoculation is still a new thing: “I wrote to my Mother for her consent to be inoculated for the small-pox, but since see that she thinks it a piece of presumption. When you favor me with a line, pray let me have your opinion of it!”

In 1768, we find the authorities at William and Mary resolving “that an ad. be inserted in the Gazette to inform the Publick that the College is now clear of small-pox,” and a few days later they frame another resolution that “fifty pounds be allowed to Dr. Carter for his care and attendance on those afflicted with said disorder at the College.”

Meanwhile the colonists had not followed up their good beginning at Mount Malado. Hospitals had not grown with the growth of the community. Doctors had none of the advantages of the study of surgery and medicine which are given by the hospital system, but the sick were tenderly cared for, nevertheless. In Jefferson’s notes on the advantages enjoyed by the Virginians, he speaks of: “their condition too when sick, in the family of a good farmer where every member is emulous to do them kind offices, where they are visited by all the neighbors, who bring them the little rarities which their sickly appetites may crave, and who take by rotation the nightly watch over them, without comparison better than in a general hospital where the sick, the dying and the dead are crammed together in the same room, and often in the same bed.” When we read the accounts of hospitals in the eighteenth century, antiseptics unknown, and even ordinary cleanliness uncommon, we can readily agree with the conclusion that “Nature and kind nursing save a much greater proportion in our plain way, at a smaller expense, and with less abuse.”

Every wind that swept the sick-room in those colonial farm houses, brought balm from the pines, or vigor from the sea. Three thousand miles of uncontaminated air stretched behind them and before. This pure, balmy, bracing air cured the sick, and kept the well in health, in spite of general disregard of hygiene, which prevailed almost universally, especially in all matters of diet. “We may venture to affirm,” exclaims a horrified Frenchman, fresh from the land of scientific cookery, “that if a premium were offered for a regimen most destructive to the teeth, the stomach and the health in general, none could be desired more efficacious for these ends than that in use among this people. At breakfast they deluge the stomach with a pint of hot water slightly impregnated with tea, or slightly tinctured, or rather coloured with coffee; and they swallow, without mastication, hot bread half-baked, soaked in melted butter, with the grossest cheese and salt or hung beef, pickled pork, or fish, all which can with difficulty be dissolved. At dinner, they devour boiled pastes, called absurdly puddings, garnished with the most luscious sauces. Their turnips and other vegetables are floated in lard or butter. Their pastry is nothing but a greasy paste imperfectly baked.”

The entire day, according to this cheerful observer, is passed in heaping one indigestible mass on another, and spurring the exhausted stomach to meet the strain, by wines and liquors of all sorts. The population who lived on such a diet, ought to have died young, to point the moral of the hygienist; but Nature pardons much to those who live in the open air. If digestions were taxed, nerves remained unstrained. Even in our age of hurry and bustle, anything like nervous prostration is rare, south of Mason and Dixon’s line. The soft air and the easy life soothe the susceptibilities, and oil the wheels of existence. It is for these reasons, perchance, that the records of the burying-grounds in the Southern colonies show such a proportion of names of octogenarians who had survived to a ripe old age, in spite of hot breads washed down with hotter liquors.

These burying-grounds of the old South are robbed of much of the dreariness of their kind by being generally laid out in close proximity to the living world, as if the chill of the tomb were beaten back by the fire-light falling on it from the familiar hearth stone close at hand. It is a comfort to think of genial Colonel Byrd, who loved so well the good things of this world, resting under a monument which duly sets forth his virtues, on the edge of the garden at Westover, beneath an arbor screened only by vines from the door where he passed in and out for so many years.

Hugh Jones, that conservative son of the church, lamented that the Virginians did not prefer to lie in the church-yard for their last long sleep. “It is customary,” he says regretfully, “to bury in garden, or orchards, where whole families lye interred together, in a spot, generally handsomely enclosed, planted with evergreens, and the graves kept decently. Hence, likewise, arises the occasion of preaching funeral sermons in houses where, at funerals, are assembled a great congregation of neighbors and friends; and if you insist on having the service and ceremony at church, they’ll say they will be without it, unless performed after their own manner.”

Here we have a flash of the spirit of resistance to undue encroachments from church or state, which flamed up half a century later into open revolt. There is something touching in this clinging to the home round which so many memories cluster, in this desire to lay the dead there close to all they had loved, and when their own time came, to lie down beside them under the shadow of the old walls which had sheltered their infancy, and youth, and age.

If the burying-grounds were cheerful, still more so were the funerals. They partook, in fact, of the nature of an Irish wake. Wine was freely drunk, and funeral baked meats demolished, while the firing of guns was so common that many asked by will that it be omitted, as friends to-day are “kindly requested to omit flowers.”

The funeral expenses of a gentleman of Baltimore town in the eighteenth century were somewhat heavy, as any one may judge from an itemized account preserved to us, which includes: “Coffin £6 16s, 41 yds. crape, 32 yds. black Tiffany, 11 yds. black crape, 5½ broadcloth, 7½ yards of black Shaloon, 16½ yds. linen, 3 yds. sheeting, 3 doz. pairs men’s black silk gloves, 2 doz. pairs women’s do., 6 pairs men’s blk. gloves (cheaper), 1 pr. women’s do., black silk handkerchiefs, 8½ yards calamanco, mohair and buckram, 13½ yds. ribbon, 47½ lbs. loaf sugar, 14 doz. eggs, 10 oz. nutmegs, 1½ pounds alspice, 20⅝ gallons white wine, 12 bottles red wine, 10⅜ gallons rum.” The total cost of these preparations amounts to upward of fifty pounds sterling, besides the two pounds to be paid to Dame Hannah Gash and Mr. Ireland for attendance, while ten shillings additional were allowed for “coffin furniture.”

When a Thomas Jefferson, ancestor of the Thomas Jefferson, died in Virginia in 1698, his funeral expenses included the items:

To Benj. Branch for a Mutton for the funerall	60lbs. tobacco.
To Ann Carraway and Mary Harris for mourning Rings	£1
To Sam’ll Branch for makeing y^e coffin	10^s
For plank for y^e coffin	2^s 6^d

The list of expenses closes with unconscious satire, thus: “Previous item—to Dr. Bowman for Phisick, 60 lbs. tobacco,” showing that every arrangement for the taking under was complete.

These inventories and wills cast wonderful sidelights on the manners and customs of “y^e olden tyme.” To our age, accustomed to endless post-mortem litigation, there is a refreshing simplicity in these old documents, which seem to take for granted that it is only necessary to state the wishes of the testator. Richard Lightfoote, ancestor of the Virginia Lightfoots, who made his will in 1625, “in the first yeare of the raigne of our Soveraigne Lord King Charles,” feeling perhaps a little fearful of disputes among his heirs, appoints Thomas Jones “to bee overseer herof, to see the same formed in all things accordinge to my true meaninge; hereby requestinge all the parties legatees aforenamed to make him judge and decider of all controversies which shall arise between them or anie of them.” But there is no record that the services of Thomas Jones were needed as mediator, and when Jane Lightfoote, his wife, makes her will, she goes about it in a still more childlike and trustful fashion.

She leaves her “little cottage pott” to one, and her “little brasse pan” to another. No object is too trifling to be disposed of individually. The inventory of Colonel Ludlow, who departed this life in 1660, is a curious jumble of things small and large. Here we have “one rapier, one hanger, and black belt, three p’r of new gloves and one p’r of horn buckskin gloves, one small silver Tankard, one new silver hat-band, two pair of silver breeches buttons, one wedding Ring, one sealed Ring, a pcell of sweet powder and 2 p’r of band strings,” besides which is specially mentioned: “Judge Richardson to y^e Wast in a picture,” valued at fifty pounds of tobacco. In addition to these, Colonel Ludlow died possessed of “12 white servants and ten negroes, 43 cattle, 54 sheep and 4 horses.”

The favorite testimonial of affection to survivors was the mourning ring or seal. These gifts figure in almost every will we examine, one mentioning a bequest of money for the purchase of “thirty rings for relatives.” The keepsakes were carefully cherished, and the survivors in turn set up the memorial tablet, or carved the tombstone, or presented some piece of plate to the parish church, to keep fresh the name and memory of the deceased. In Christ Church, at Norfolk, is an old Alms Bason marked with a Lion Passant and a Leopard’s Head crowned, in the centre a coat of arms, three Griffins’ heads erased, and the inscription:

“The gift of Capt. Whitwell in
memory of Mrs. Whitwell who was
intered in the church at Norfolk,
y^e 8^th of March, 1749.”

The same church owns a flagon with a crest, “a demi-man ppr-crowned in dexter three ostrich feathers,” given by Charles Perkins as a memorial to his wife, Elizabeth, who died in 1762.

It was a pleasant thought thus to renew the memory of departed friends by flagon, and plate, and alms-basin—a wiser way, one feels, than the carving of long epitaphs on gloomy stones surmounted by skull and cross-bones. How often, as we read these dreary tributes, we long for some shock of truth to nature, among all this decorous conventionalism! What tales these old colonial graveyards might have told us if they would! Here lie men who, perchance, supped with Shakespeare, or jested with Jonson and Marlow at The Mermaid.

Here rest gallants who closed round the royal standard on the fatal field of Marston Moor, or danced at Buckingham Palace with the free and fair dames of the merry court of Charles Second after the Restoration; but not a word of all this appears on the stones that represent them. Their epitaphs plaster them over with all the Christian virtues, and obscure their individuality as completely as the whitewash brushes of Cromwell’s soldiers obliterated the dark, quaintly carved oak of the cathedrals. De mortuis nil nisi bonum makes churchyard literature very dull reading, when it should be the most interesting and instructive in the world. Had the stones set forth the lives of those who rest beneath, we might learn much of such a man as Sir George Somers, whose strange experiences on the Sea-Venture and his adventures on the Bermudas make me want to know more of him. I want to know what caused the trouble between him and Gates; how he built his cedar ships; how he looked, and walked, and talked; and what manner of man he was, all in all. Instead of gratifying my innocent curiosity, his tombstone in Whitchurch, where he is buried, puts me off with a florid verse of poor poetry, and I am little better helped when I turn to the records of the island where he died. Here Capt. Nathaniel Butler, “finding accidentally” (so runs the old chronicle) “a little crosse erected in a by-place amongst a great many of bushes, understanding there was buried the heart and intrailes of Sir George Somers, hee resolved to have a better memory of so worthy a Souldier than that. So, finding also a great Marble Stone brought out of England, hee caused it to bee wrought handsomely, and laid over the place, which he invironed with a square wall of hewen stone, tombe-like, wherein hee caused to be graven this epitaph he had composed, and fixed it on the Marble Stone and thus it was:

“In the year 1611
Noble Sir George Summers went hence to Heaven
Whose noble, well-tried worth that held him still imploid
Gave him the knowledge of the world so wide.
Hence ’t was by heavens decree that to this place
He brought new guests and name to mutual grace.
At last his soule and body being to part,
He here bequeathed his entrailes and his heart.”

Even this gives us more information about the dead than most of the epitaphs. They are composed, as a rule, with Jonsonian elaborateness, and might as well be set up over Rasselas, as over those they commemorate.

On the tomb of President Nelson of his Majesty’s Council, in the old York churchyard, a pompous inscription announces: “Reader, if you feel the spirit of that exalted ardor which aspires to the felicity of conscious virtue, animated by those consolations and divine admonitions, perform the task and expect the distinction of the righteous man!” The “distinction of the righteous” is a delightful phrase, and sets forth the instinctive belief of the Cavalier in aristocracy in heaven.

A Latin inscription was regarded as an appropriate tribute to the learning of the deceased, who, had his ghost walked o’ nights, might have needed to brush up his classics to make quite sure of what his survivors were saying about him.

In happy contrast to the frigidity of these epitaphs wherein the dead languages bury their dead, is the verse written by his son over the “Hon^ble Coll. Digges,” who died in 1744:

“Diggs, ever to extremes untaught to bend
Enjoying life, yet mindful of its end
In thee the world an happy mingling saw
Of sprightly humor and religious awe.”

How it warms our hearts to find the word humor on a gravestone! It takes the chill out of death itself, and inspires us with the hope that this most lovable of traits may stand as good a chance of immortality as Faith, Hope, or Charity.

A brief and business-like epitaph written over Mistress Lucy Berkeley, declares that “She left behind her 5 children viz. 2 Boys and 3 Girls. I shall not pretend to give her full character; it would take too much room for a Grave-stone. Shall only say she never neglected her duty to her Creator in publick or private. She was charitable to the poor, a kind Mistress, Indulgent Mother, and Obedient Wife.”

For a parallel to this matron who neglected no duty, “publick or private,” we must seek the tomb of a maiden. On the crumbling stone the tribute still survives, and tells that

“In a Well grounded Certainty of an
Immortal Resurrection
Here lyes the Remains of Elizabeth
the Daughter of
John and Catharine Washington
She was a Maiden
Virtuous without Reservedness
Wise without Affectation
Beautiful without Knowing it
She left this life on the Fifth day of
Feb^r in the Year MDCCXXXVI in the
Twentieth Year of her age.”

One more epitaph of the Colonial Cavaliers I must quote in full, because it alone, of all I have studied, does give a picture of the man who lies under it. If it praises him too much, it is to be set down to his credit that one who knew him well believed it all; and I for one wish peace to the dust of this gallant old mariner who sailed the seas in colonial days. Here he lies, sunk at his moorings, “one who never struck his flag while he had a shot in the locker; who carried sail in chace till all was blue; in peace whose greatest glory was a staggering top-sail breeze; in war to bring his broadside to bear upon the enemy, and who, when signals of distress hove out, never stood his course, but hauled or tacked or wore to give relief, though to a foe; who steered his little bark full fifty annual cruises over life’s tempestuous ocean and moored her safe in port at last; where her timbers being crazy, and having sprung a leak in the gale, she went down with a clear hawse. If these traits excite in the breast of humanity that common tribute to the memory of the departed—a sigh—then traveller as thou passest this wreck, let thine be borne upon the breeze which bends the grassy covering of the grave of Old Job Pray.”

This stone, like many another we find in these old brick-walled Southern burying-grounds, brings a smile which borders close upon a tear. The very spelling and lettering in these primitive inscriptions seem moss-grown with age, and tell of generations passed away, bearing their manners and customs before them, as Mary Stuart bears her head on the charger in the Abbotsford picture. Here on one crumbling stone we read of a matron who hated strife with a capital “S” and loved peace with a little “p.” Here we read the touching little life-history of the young wife of John Page, who “blest her said Husband with a sonn and a Daughter and departed this life, the twelfth day of November, Anno Dom 1702, and in the 20th yeare of her age.”

The inscriptions on the oldest tombstones are undecipherable. The bluestone slab under the ruined arch at Jamestown clasped by the roots of the sycamore was so broken and defaced even when Lossing visited it that nothing remained but the shadowy date, 1608. But in the earliest inscriptions that survive, we are struck by the virile and nervous English. It smacks of “great Eliza’s golden day.” A fragment of one runs:

“O Death! all-eloquent, you only prove
What dust we dote on when ’t is man we love.”

But finest of all is the noble dirge, sung over Bacon’s lifeless body by some one whose name will never now be surely known, since he disguised his identity, prompted by a wise dread of Berkeley’s malignant revenge, and states that after Bacon’s death “he was bemoaned in these following lines, drawn by the man that waited upon his person as it is said, and who attended his corpse to their burial place.” Whoever the writer was, and a high authority designates him as a man named Cotton, dweller at Acquia Creek, it is very sure that no serving-man composed these lines, which are like an echo of the age that gave us Lycidas:

“Who is’t must plead our cause? Nor trump nor drum
Nor deputations; these, alas! are dumb;
And can not speak. Our arms, though ne’er so strong,
Will want the aid of his commanding tongue.

“Here let him rest; while we this truth report
He’s gone from hence unto a higher court
To plead his cause, where he by this doth know,
Whether to Cæsar he was friend or foe.”

These closing words may well form the epitaph written over the Colonial Cavalier. He is gone from hence unto a higher court—gone from this world forever. His open-handed hospitality, his reckless profusion, his chivalry to women, his quick-tempered, sword-thrusting honor, are as obsolete as his lace ruffles, his doublet and jerkin, his buckles and jewels and feathers. We are fallen on a prosaic age, and it is only in our dreams of the past that we conjure up, like a gay decoration against the neutral background of modern life, the figure of “The Colonial Cavalier.”