learn that on July 3, 1622, “Francis Carter passed over sixteen shares of land in Virginia to Mr. Edward Palmer, of the Middle Temple, London, esquire," who may have been the individual referred to by Fuller, and Palmer's island, at the mouth of the Susquehanna, is where Clayborne traded with the Indians before Lord Baltimore obtained a grant for Maryland.

Although unforeseen circumstances prevented Copeland's acceptance of the rectorship of the proposed college at Henrico, he continued to feel an interest in the American plantations. The leading men of the Virginia Company were also members of the Somers Island or Bermudas Company, and under the auspices of the latter Copeland became a non-conformist minister at those isles of the sea.

Since 1615 the Rev. Richard Norwood, a distinguished surveyor and Puritan, had taught school there, and old records show that both Copeland and Ferrar were contributors to the free school in that locality.

Norwood continued as school teacher for more than thirty years, and in 1648 Copeland, when nearly eighty years of age, accompanied Governor Sayle to establish a new plantation at Eleuthera, one of the Bahamas. In the charter of the colony it was stipulated that each settler should enjoy entire freedom of conscience.

Sayle, shortly after he reached Eleuthera, visited the Puritan parishes of Virginia, and invited the parishioners, who were uncomfortable under the strictness of Governor Berkeley, to remove to the new colony.

The Rev. Mr. Harrison, formerly Berkeley's chaplain, but now a Puritan, was sent to Boston to ask the advice of the ministers there relative to emigration to Eleuthera. They decided that it was inexpedient, partly because an entire separation of church and state was proposed by the projectors of the new settlement. From this period we can learn nothing of Copeland, and probably this early friend of education in America died at the Bahamas.

Four years before John Harvard, the gentle minister of Charlestown, died, and bequeathed his estate to the college at Cambridge, Massachusetts, Benjamin Symmes, of Virginia, left the first legacy by a resident of the American plantations for founding a school. In a will, made in 1634, he gave two hundred acres on the Poquoson, a small stream that enters Chesapeake bay below Yorktown, "with the milk and increase of eight cows, for the maintenance of a learned and honest man, to keep upon the said ground a free school, for the education and instruction of the children of the adjoining parishes of Elizabeth City

and Kiquotan, from Mary's Mount downwards, to the Poquoson river." The author of a little pamphlet on Virginia, published in 1649, alludes to the early friend of education in this language: "I may not forget to tell you that we have a free school, with two hundred acres of land, a fine house upon it, forty milch kine, and other accommodation to it. The benefactor deserveth perpetual mention, Mr. Benjamin Symmes, worthy to be chronicled. Other petty schools we have."

A long period now elapsed before another benefaction to schools was chronicled. Dr. Gataker, in a work dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, and published in 1657, deplores the neglect of education in Virginia. In March, 1660-'1, the assembly of the colony enacted: "That for the advance of learning, education of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion of piety, there be land taken upon purchase for a college and free school, and that there be, with as much speed as may be convenient, houseing erected thereon for entertainment of students and scholars;" and at the same session a petition to the King was drawn up, praying for "letters patent to collect and gather the charity of well disposed people in England, for the erecting of colleges and schools." The year after the restoration of Charles the Second, a pamphlet, dedicated to the Bishop of London, written by a minister who had lived many years in America, was published, called "Virginia's Cure, or an Advisive Narrative Concerning Virginia," in which it was suggested that charitable persons in England should endow Virginia fellowships in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He stated that schools in the colony were so few that "there was a very numerous generation of Christian children born in Virginia, unserviceable for any employment of church or state;" and also adds that the members of the House of Burgesses were "usually such as went over servants thither, and though by time and industry they may have obtained competent estates, yet by reason of their poor and mean condition were unskilful in judging of a good estate, either of church or commonwealth, or of the means of procuring it."

Berkeley, who had been deposed from the governorship during the Cromwellian era, was reinstated in 1661, and proved more churlish than before. In 1671, the home government made a number of queries, the last of which was: "What course is taken about instructing the people within your government in the Christian religion; and what provision is there made for the paying of your ministry?" To which he answered: "The same course that is taken in England out of towns; every man, according to his ability, instructing his children. We have forty-eight

parishes, and our ministers are well paid, and by my consent would be better, if they would pray oftener and preach less. But, as of all other commodities, so of this, the worst are sent us, and we had few that we could boast of, since the persecution in Cromwell's tyranny drove divers worthy men hither. But, I thank God, there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects, into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government."

Notwithstanding this splenitive declaration of the aged governor, in 1675 Henry Peasley bequeathed six hundred acres in Abingdon parish, Gloucester county, "together with ten cows and one breeding mare, for the maintenance of a free school forever, to be kept with a schoolmaster for the education of the children of the parishes of Abingdon and Ware."

About the period of the accession of William and Mary, a new element in the emigration to Virginia appeared. They were men of angular manners and brawny frames, but also of educated minds and warm hearts. They had been nurtured in a land which for more than a hundred years had enacted in solemn assembly that there should be a school in every parish, for the instruction of youth in grammar, the Latin language, and the principles of religion; and at a later period that the school should be so far supported by the public funds as to render education accessible to even the poorest in the community. Macaulay, in his History of England, referring to the school law of Scotland, says the effect of its passage was immediately felt: "Before one generation passed away it began to be evident that the common people of Scotland were superior in intelligence to the common people of any other country in Europe. To whatever land the Scotchman might wander, to whatever calling he might betake himself, in America or India, in trade or in war, by the advantage which he derived from his early training, he was raised above his competitors."

When these men, bearing the names of Gordon, Monro, Inglis, Irvine, Blair, Porteus, the ancestor of a bishop of the church of England, came to Virginia, there was a stirring of life in communities long torpid. They felt that they had no home unless they had a school-house near, and began anew to agitate the subject of establishing the free school and college. The leader of the movement was the Rev. James Blair, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh in 1673, and gifted with the "fervidam vim Scotorum." His projects met with opposition, but he

was canny and did not shrink from a good fight; and, after controversy with Sir Edmund Andros, of Connecticut fame, and with the assembly of Virginia, and his brethren of the church, toward the close of the century succeeded in establishing the College of William and Mary, of which, in a sketch of education during the eighteenth century, it is proposed to give a full history. The preamble to the statutes of William and Mary College, published at an early period both in Latin and English, fully states the influences that led to the organization of the institution, with a portion of which we conclude this historical sketch: "Nowhere was there any greater danger on account of ignorance and want of instruction than in the English colonies of America, in which the first planters had much to do in a country overrun with weeds and briers, and for many years infested with the incursions of the barbarous Indians, to earn a mean livelihood with hard labor. There were no schools to be found in those days, nor any opportunity for good education.

"Some few, and a very few indeed, of the richer sort, sent their children to England to be educated, and there, after many dangers from the seas and enemies, and unusual distempers occasioned by the change of country and climate, they were often taken off by small-pox and other diseases. It was no wonder if this occasioned a great defect of understanding and all sort of literature, and that it was followed with a new generation of men far short of their forefathers, which, if they had the good fortune, though at a very indifferent rate, to read and write, had no further commerce with the muses or learned sciences, but spent their life ignobly with the hoe and spade, and other employments of an uncultivated and unpolished country. There remained still, notwithstanding, a small remnant of men of better spirit, who had the benefit of better education themselves in their mother country, or at least had heard of it from others. These men's private conferences among themselves produced at last a scheme of a free school and college," which was exhibited to the president and council in 1690, a little before the arrival of Lieutenant Governor Nicholson, and the next year to the assembly, when Blair was sent to England to collect funds for the college.

JAMES BLAIR, D.D.

JAMES BLAIR, D.D., named in the charter the first President of William and Mary College, and entitled, by his judicious and persistent efforts in securing the same, together with the means by which the institution was put in operation, to be called its founder, was born in Scotland in 1656, and educated at Edinburgh University, where he graduated in 1676. After officiating as clergyman in an Episcopal church in Scotland for several years, he was selected by Dr. Compton, Bishop of London, in 1685, for missionary work in Virginia; and here he gave such satisfaction for his efficient and judicious course as to be commissioned as his Commissary in that colony in 1689. In his new and difficult field he soon felt the need of intelligent laymen, as well as of pious clergymen born and educated in the country, and at once set about the establishment of a seminary for this purpose. In this work he was aided by Lieutenant-Governor Nicholson, who arrived from New York in 1690 [Lord Effingham being absent from ill health], who headed a subscription, which reached £2,500. The Assembly which met in 1691 commended the enterprise in an address to their majesties William and Mary, and depnted the Commissary, Mr. Blair, to present the same. The charter was granted February 14, 1792, with a gift of £2,000, besides an endowment of 20,000 acres of land, the patronage of the office of Surveyor General, and the revenue arising from a duty of one penny a pound on all tobacco exported from Virginia and Maryland to other plantations. The Bishop of London was named the first Chancellor, and Rev. James Blair the first President, and the college was allowed to return a member to the Assembly. Mr. Blair also obtained several individual subscriptions, the largest from the Hon. Robert Boyle, for the endowment of a Professorship devoted to the conversion of the Indians, called the Brafferton Foundation,* from an estate in England in which the subscription was invested. When the first edifice erected in 1693, was destroyed by fire in 1705, President Blair at once set about raising the means to rebuild, which was done within a year, Queen Anne contributing liberally for this object. He was also successful in an application to the Assembly for an endowment for poor scholars; the £1,000 thus granted was invested in the Nottoway estate, the income of which was applied to certain scholarships down to 1777.

In 1722 Dr. Blair published four octavo volumes made up of discourses delivered on different texts selected from Our Saviour's Sermon on the Mount, which were republished in 1732, and had a high reputation for a century after his death.

As Commissary, Dr. Blair was member of the Council, or Upper House of Assembly for fifty years, and rector of the parish of Middle Plantations, or Williamsburg. He died August 1, 1743, in the 88th year of his age, and 64th of his ministry, leaving his library (of over one thousand volumes) to the college.

*Mr. Boyle died before his subscription was made, but the trustees to whom he left the bulk of his estate for the advancement of the Christian religion, invested £5,400 in the Brafferton estate, and gave £45 of the income to the support of two missionaries to the Indians in Maryland, £45 to Harvard College, and the remainder to William and Mary College, on condition of their supporting one Indian scholar for every £14 received.