Elizabeth Christine Cook
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 74
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII The Virginia Gazette As we turn southward to the heart of the Old Dominion, we enter a society whose interest in pure letters was more natural, more permanent, and more unrestricted than that of any other section of British America. Not so enterprising, perhaps; we hear of no brilliant young apprentices doing without luncheon to read, or busily planning new projects for the general culture of the community. The Virginian took all these things easily and gracefully as his birthright. Col. Henry Fitzhugh, for instance, whose father left him a study full of books in his will of 1700,1 had no particular reason to be ardently interested in a subscription library. When we remember, too, that he was matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1722, the situation becomes even clearer. Not only did the custom of educating sons at Oxford or Cambridge linger in Virginia, but native boys who went to William and Mary often met there professors who had been trained abroad, or had lived abroad. Literary London was far nearer Williamsburg than Boston. Books of a secular nature could have been found in the ordinary Virginia household. The interesting 1 Recorded in the Stafford County Records, dated 1700; see The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. II, pp. 277: "My Study of Books (I leave) to William and Henry." researches of President Lyon Gardiner Tyler, of William and Mary College, and Mr. William G. Stanard, of the Virginia Historical Society, have unearthed from the old county records of wills and inventories of estates, valuable evidence of such volumes even in comparatively poor families.2 Christopher Robinson of Urbanna, whose estate netted only about two hundred and fifty pounds, had, according to the inventory of March 28, ...