The Balls might well be proud to belong to old England's middle classes--her landed, untitled Gentry. A few great minds--Lord Francis Verulam, for instance--came from her nobility; and some gifted writers--the inspired dreamer, for instance--from her tinkers and tradesmen; but the mighty host of her scholars, poets, and philosophers belonged to her middle classes. They sent from their ranks Shakespeare and Milton, Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, Gibbon, Dryden, "old Sam Johnson," Pope, Macaulay, Stuart Mill, Huxley, Darwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burke, Disraeli, Cowper, Sir William Blackstone, and nearly all of the Chief Justices of England. These are but a few of the great names that shine along the ranks of England's middle classes. Many of these men were called to the foot of the throne by a grateful sovereign to receive some distinction,--so paltry by comparison with glory of their own earning,--and among them came one day an ancestor of the mother of George Washington. Who he was we know not, nor yet what had been his service to his country; but he was deemed worthy to bear upon his shield a lion rampant, the most honorable emblem of heraldry, and the lion's paws held aloft a ball! This much we know of him,--that in addition to his valor and fidelity he possessed a poet's soul. He chose for the motto, the _cri de guerre_ of his clan, a suggestive phrase from these lines of Ovid:-- "He gave to man a noble countenance and commanded him to gaze upon the heavens, and to carry his looks upward to the stars." [Illustration: WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE.] CHAPTER III THE BALL FAMILY IN VIRGINIA The first of the family of Ball to come to Virginia was William Ball, who settled in Lancaster County in 1650. He was the son of the attorney of Lincoln's Inn. He emigrated, with other cavaliers because of the overthrow of the royal house and the persecution of its adherents. Before this time one John Washington, an Englishman and a loyalist, had settled in Westmoreland. He became a man of influence in the colony, rising rapidly from major to colonel, justice of Westmoreland, and member of the House of Burgesses; accepting positions under the Commonwealth, as did others of King Charles's adherents; doing their duty under the present conditions, and consoling themselves by calling everything--towns, counties, rivers, and their own sons--after the "Martyred Monarch"; and in rearing mulberry trees and silkworms to spin the coronation robe of purple for the surely coming time of the Restoration.