194 DUTCH AND ENGLISH ON THE HUDSON

currency, to be paid by the church masters and
promised that they would speak with him fur-
ther on the subject of his seeking subscriptions in
the congregation, a favor for which John Peter
was duly grateful.

Governor William Cosby, as he drove in his
coach on a Sunday to Trinity Church, or as he
walked in stately raiment, attended by a negro
servant who carried his prayer-book on a velvet
cushion, could have little dreamed that the young
printer striding past him on his way to play the
organ in the old Dutch Church was destined to be
the instrument of His Excellency's downfall; but
the time was not far off when this David, armed
only with a blackened type of his printer's form,
was to set forth against this Goliath. All flaming
convictions have a tendency to cool into cant, and
"the Freedom of the Press" has so long been a
vote-catching phrase that it is hard nowadays to
realize that it was once $n expression of an ideal
for which men were willing to die but which they
scarcely hoped to achieve.

When Colonel Cosby, former Governor of Min-
orca, came over the seas in 1732, to become
Governor of New York, he brought with him a
none too savory reputation. All that he seemed