Meanwhile, after a short service in the governor’s office by Hugh Drysdale (1722)[617] and Robert Carter, in 1727 William Gooch took the chair, and held it for twenty-two years. It was a time of only chance excitement, and the province prospered in wealth and population. The governor proved conciliatory and became a favorite of the people. He granted toleration to the Presbyterians, who were now increasing on the frontiers, where Mackemie and the Scotch-Irish were beginning to gain influence, and the sturdy pioneers were thinking of the country beyond the mountains.[618] Some of the tide-water spirit was pushing that way, and in 1745 Lord Fairfax settled in the valley, built his Greenway Court, and passed his life in chasing game and giving it to his guests, with other hospitable cheer.[619] Tall and gaunt of person, sharp in his visage and defective in his eyesight, if he had little of personal attraction for strangers, he had the inheritance of some of the best culture of England, and could hand to his guests a volume of the _Spectator_, open at his own essays. Disappointed in love at an early day, Fairfax added a desire for seclusion to a disposition naturally eccentric. He had come to America for divertisement, and, enamored of the country and its easy life, he had finally determined on settling on his property. The mansion, which he had intended to erect with all the dignity of its manorial surroundings, was never begun; but he built a long one-story building, with sloping roof and low eaves. Here he lived on through the Revolution, a pronounced Tory, but too respected to be disturbed, until the news of Yorktown almost literally struck him dead at ninety-two. Along the river bottoms of the lowlands, while Major Mayo[620] was laying out Richmond (1733), and while all tradition was scorned in the establishment of the _Virginia Gazette_ (1736),[621] the ruling classes of the great estates felt that they were more rudely jostled than ever before, when Whitefield passed that way, harrying the church,[622] and even splitting the communions of the Presbyterians as he journeyed in other parts.