University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION.

In the Dark Ages, when the only chimney was a hole in the
roof, and the only carpet a spread of green rushes on the floor,
the visitor who was most hospitably welcomed to the torch-lit
castle-hall, was the minstrel with his harp, or the half-inspired
reciter of the heroic songs and glowing epics of the
people. The Beowulf and Sagas were declaimed from decade to
decade in the shadows of the fireside, long before they were
committed even to writing. And it was in those bookless times
also that many a medicant, with no property but his staff and
his wallet, but with a past full of stirring adventure, related
in the shifting shadows, to the listening family, eagerly leaning
forward, the story of his perilous wanderings in foreign lands,
or recounted his share in some famous siege or battle of his
own day.

No modern writer has caught the dramatic spirit, the racy
flavor, of these personal narratives of the primitive ages with
such absolute verisimilitude as Defoe. Who can read his description
of the Great London Plague except with the conviction
that it is the record of an eyewitness, who saw every
phase of that appalling event as it passed from stage to stage
of its progress. There is a fidelity, a freshness, a minuteness
of observation, in that description which would seem to be impossible
in a writer who was drawing simply upon his imagination,—only
an eyewitness, one would say, could have seen
all these things; and only an eyewitness could have retained
such living memories of them.

There is much of this rare spirit in Mr. Robinson's story of
the Great Fire at the University of Virginia. It is the spirit
of the eyewitness, who has also the ability to record his impressions
with all the vividness of reality. Every incident of
that remarkable scene is preserved just as it occurred; but,
while each one is presented separately, they form, as a whole,

a picture which can never be forgotten. It is as though the details
of a battle, or a Derby race, had been seized by the mind
of an observer with absolute precision and perfection just at
the moment of the highest tension, or the most appalling energy,
and at once crystallized in a permanent form, like a picture
by Meissonier or Rosa Bonheur. The burning of the Rotunda
is the most dramatic episode in the history of the University.
It will never cease to make a moving appeal, not only because
it was so frightful in itself, but also because it called forth, as
at the sound of a trumpet, the noblest emotions and the highest
powers of the Visitors, Faculty, alumni and students alike.
Nowhere is there to be found such a graphic description of
those scenes as in the pages of the present monograph,—a
contemporary document which still palpitates with the energy,
the devotion, the exalted spirit of that wonderful hour,—an
hour apparently, for the moment, fatal to the fortunes of the
University, but, in reality, destined to be the seed of a rebirth
so far-reaching in its influences that not even yet, although
nearly a generation has passed, are we able to calculate its
beneficent aftermath with even approximate accuracy.