Note 664 — Chapter IV

One of the earliest accounts of the college is in the paper of 1696-98 (Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. v. section xii.). Palmer (Calendar, p. 61) gives a bill for facilitating the payment of donations to the college (1698). Its charter is given in The Present State, etc., by Blair and others, was printed at Williamsburg in 1758, and is found in the History of the College of William and Mary (1660-1874), printed with the general catalogue at Richmond in 1874. An oration by E. Randolph on the founders of William and Mary College was printed at Williamsburg in 1771. Jones in 1724 gave a rather melancholy picture of the institution, then a quarter of a century old. It is, he says, “a college without a chapel, without a scholarship, and without a statute; a library without books, comparatively speaking, and a president without a fixed salary, till of late.” (Hugh Jones’s Present State, 83.) Other sketches are Historical Sketch of the College of William and Mary, Richmond, 1866 (20 pp.); History of William and Mary College from the foundation, Baltimore, 1870; and Mr. C. F. Richardson’s “Old Colonial College” in the Mag. of Amer. History, Nov., 1884. Richardson, together with Henry Alden Clark, also edited The College Book, which includes an account of the college, as of others in the United States. Doyle (English in America, 363) says, “We may well doubt if the college did much for the colony.... It is evident it was nothing better than a boarding-school, in which Blair had no small difficulty in contending against the extravagance engendered by the home training of his pupils.”