ROB OF THE BOWL, A ROMANCE OF THE DAYS OF CHARLES II. BY J. P. KENNEDY. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. Price twenty-four shillings. 460. ROB OF THE BOWL. CHAPTER I. No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, And the long grass o'ertops the mould'ring walls. It is now more than one hundred and fortyfour years since the ancient capital of Maryland was shorn of its honours, by the removal of the public offices, and, along with them, the public functionaries, to Annapolis. The date of this removal, I think, is recorded as of the VOL. 1. B year of grace sixteen hundred and ninety-four. The port of St. Mary's, up to that epoch, from the first settlement of the province, comprehending rather more than three score years, had been the seat of the Lord Proprietary's government. This little city had grown up in hard-favoured times, which had their due effect n leaving upon it the visible tokens of a stunted vegetation: it waxed gnarled and crooked, as it perked itself upward through the thorny troubles of its existence, and might be likened to the black jack, which yet retains a foothold in this region,-a scrubby, tough and hardy mignon of the forest, whose elder day of crabbed luxuriance affords a sour comment upon the nurture of its youth. Geographers are aware that the city of St. Mary's stood on the left bank of the river which now bears the same name (though of old it was called St. George's,) and which flows into the Potomac at the southern extremity of the tate of Maryland, on the western side of the Chesapeake Bay, at a short distance westward from Point Lookout: but the very spot where the old city stood is known only to a few, for the traces of the early residence of the Proprietary government have nearly faded away from the knowledge of this generation. An astute antiquarian eye, however, may define the site of the town by the few scattered bricks which the ploughshare has mingled with the ordinary tillage of the fields. It may be determined, still more visibly, by the mouldering and shapeless ruin of the ancient State House, whose venerable remains, -I relate it with a blush-have been pillaged, to furnish building materials for an unsightly church, which now obtrusively presents its mottled, mortar-stained and shabby front to the view of the visiter, immediately beside the wreck of this early monument of the founders of Maryland. Over these ruins a storm-shaken and magnificent mulberry aboriginal, and cotemporary with the settlement of the province, yet rears its shattered and topless trunk, |