Page 122. A parley. This is, of course, purely imaginary. There was no parley.
Page 122. Then instant from his horse. Wolfe was not on horseback.
Page 129. The Virginia Song. When David Garrick wrote "Hearts of Oak" as an expression of English patriotism, he little dreamed that he was furnishing ammunition for England's enemies. It was to the air of that song that the most popular of the colonial patriotic songs were written, and it was probably better known than any of our national songs are to us to-day. Such versions as "The Virginia Song," "The Patriot's Appeal," "The Massachusetts Song," and "The Liberty Song" were printed on broadside sheets and in newspaper columns and sung in village meeting and city street throughout the land, awakening immense enthusiasm.
Page 131. The Liberty Pole. From "The Procession with the Standard of Faction, a Cantata," a four-page folio preserved in the Du Simitière collection of broadsides.
Page 132. Who carry caps and pouches. "Pouches," perhaps a survival of the days of the hand-grenade.
Page 132. Crispus Attucks. Attucks was a resident of Framingham, and there is some difference of opinion as to whether he was a mulatto or half-breed Indian. His only claim to remembrance is that he happened to be in the path of a British bullet on that March day in Boston.
Page 135. A New Song called the Gaspee. The author of this old ballad is unknown. It was rescued from oblivion by Mr. John S. Taylor, who printed it in his "Sketches of Newport and its Vicinity," New York, 1842.
Page 138. Tremble! for know, I, Thomas Gage. Gage was the last royal governor of Massachusetts, and the best hated.
Page 139. Against Virginia's hostile land. Patrick Henry's famous speech, delivered in 1764 before the House of Burgesses, had never ceased to ring in the ears of royalty, and the people of Virginia had long been regarded as a "rebellious band that must be broken."
Page 139. Hail, Middlesex! A small number of the people of Middlesex County, Virginia, early in 1774, had adopted some Royalist "resolves," an event which gave rise to the following epigram by a "Lady of Pennsylvania":—