aN (OLD VCGOLONIAL CAPITLAL.

of social Williamsburg in its palmy days. He tells of “the Play House and
Bowling Green,” and says of the governor’s house that it was “finished and
beautified with gates, fine gardens, offices, walks, a fine canal, orchards, etc.”
It had a cupola or “ Lanthorn,” which was illuminated on festival nights, as was
most of the town. “These buildings,” remarks the Rev. Hugh Jones, “are
justly reputed the best in all
the English America, and are
exceeded by few of their kind
in England.”

In the old Capitol met
those patriotic Burgesses who
sent their ringing answer to
Adams and Otis and the rest
in Massachusetts,

<¢ When, echoing back her Henry’s cry,
came pulsing on each breath

Of northern winds the thrilling sound,
of ‘ Liberty or Death.’ ”

 

Only an excavation and a
few bricks now remain where IN OLD WILLIAMSBURG.
once the historic building
stood in which Patrick Henry thundered that warning to England’s king, that
is so familiar to every school boy; but if we close our eyes on this consecrated
ground we can hardly fail to hear echoes of days that are dead come ringing
down to us through the generations. Here, and in the old State House in
Boston, was the birth of American independence; the dawn of a new day for
the nations, the genesis of a higher ideal of government.

For three quarters of a century Williamsburg was the most important polit-
ical and social center in the colonies south of Boston. It saw during that period
a long succession of royal governors, good, bad and indifferent. There was the
coarse and domineering Nicholson; Sir Alexander Spotswood, who, for planting
the first iron furnaces in the South, is known as “ the Tubal Cain of Virginia; ”
Hugh Drysdale, Robert Carter and William Gooch, whose administrations had
little to make them memorable except the foundation of Richmond, in 1733, by
Colonel William Byrd of Westover, and the appearance in Williamsburg, in 1736,
of Virginia’s first newspaper, The Virginia Gazette. After Gooch came Din-
widdie, in whose time France and England’ came to blows in the “ Great Woods,”
and the young surveyor, George Washington, won his spurs as a soldier. Now
the struggle for independence was dimly foreshadowed, and the peaceful, stately
life of the old city was stirred by unwonted currents. In 1763, Henry, the
great orator of his day, asserted, in his fiery way in the old Capitol, the right of