“Mr Wm Parks intending to open a book-seller’s shop in this Town, and having proposed to furnish the students of this College with such books at a reasonable price as the Masters shall direct him to send for, and likewise to take all the schoolbooks now in the College and pay 35 p. cent on the sterling cost to make it currency, his proposals are unanimously agreed to.”
The first building of William and Mary College was planned, so they say, by Sir Christopher Wren, but it was burned down, one night only five years after the grand celebration, “the governor and all the gentlemen in town coming to the lamentable spectacle; many of them getting out of their beds.” Again and again the building has suffered from the flames. Yet as it stands there to-day—with its stiff, straight walls stained and weather-beaten, its bricks laid up in the good old English fashion of stretchers and headers, its steps worn with the tread of generations—it is full of a pensive charm. Its record is one for Virginians to be proud of, since as one of them boasts:
“It has sent out for their work in the world twenty-seven soldiers of the Revolution, two attorney-generals, nearly twenty members of Congress, fifteen senators, seventeen governors, thirty-seven judges, a lieutenant-general, two commodores, twelve professors, four signers of the Declaration, seven cabinet officers, a chief justice, and three presidents of the United States.”
If I was tempted at first, as I stood before the brick, barn-like building, to exclaim at its ugliness, my frivolous criticism was abashed, as this phantom procession filed through its doorway, for I too, who am not of their blood, claim a share in their greatness, and salute their names with reverent humility.
Laws, Punishments, and Politics
