came nearest to our newspapers—the official gazettes. Julius Caesar,
when consul in 59 B.C., first caused the transactions of the Senate
(_Acta Senatus_) to be regularly published; before his time, there
had been only an occasional publication of its decrees. Augustus
stopped the issue of this Senatorial Gazette, though the minutes
continued to be regularly kept, at first by senators of the Emperor’s
choice, afterwards by a secretary specially appointed. Further,
Julius Caesar instituted a regular official gazette of general news,
the _Acta diurna_, which continued under the Empire. There was an
official editor; the gazette was exhibited daily in public, and copied
by scribes, who sold it to their customers; the original copy was
afterwards laid up in the public archives, where it could be consulted.
This gazette contained announcements or decrees by the Government,
notices relating to the magistrature and the law-courts, and other
matters of public interest; also a register of births, marriages,
and deaths, and occasionally other advertisements concerning private
families. This gazette had a wide circulation. Tacitus, for example,
says that a certain event could not be hidden from the army, because
the legionaries throughout the provinces had read it in the gazette.
But it was simply a bald record of facts; there was no comment. Cicero,
writing from Asia, complains that a private correspondent at Rome has
sent him only such news as appears in a gazette—about matches of
gladiators and adjournment of courts—and has given him no political
intelligence.
The _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1740 contains a short and quaint paper
by Dr. Johnson, in which he transcribes some supposed fragments of a
Roman gazette for the year 168 B.C. These were first published
in 1615, and in 1692 were defended by Dodwell, but are now recognized
as fifteenth-century forgeries. We have no genuine fragments of the
Roman gazettes. None the less, Johnson’s comparison of them with the
English newspapers of 1740 may well suggest a reflection. The Roman
gazette under the Empire did not give the transactions of the Senate,
any more than it admitted political comment. In the newspapers of
Johnson’s time, the parliamentary reports were still very irregular and
imperfect; while criticism of public men was fain to take the disguise,
however thin, of allegory. Thus the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ regaled its
readers, from month to month, with “Proceedings and Debates in the
Senate of Lilliput.” It was when the House of Commons had ceased to
represent the public opinion of the country, that this opinion became
resolved to have an outlet in the press. Parliament having ceased to
discharge its proper function, the press became the popular court
of appeal. The battle for a free press, in the full modern sense,
was fought out between 1764 and 1771—beginning in 1764 with the
persecution of Wilkes for attacking Bute in the _North Briton_, and
ending with the successful resistance, in 1771, to the proclamation
by which the Commons had forbidden the publication of their debates.
Six printers, who had infringed it, were summoned to the bar of the
House; five obeyed; and the messenger of the House was sent to arrest
the sixth. The Lord Mayor of London sent the messenger to prison. The
House of Commons sent the Lord Mayor to the Tower. But he was followed
by cheering crowds. He was released at the next prorogation; and the
day on which he left the Tower marked the end of the last attempt to
silence the press. The next few years saw the beginning of the first
English journals which exercised a great political and social power.
The _Times_ dates from 1788. Thus a period memorable for Americans
has something of analogous significance for their kinsmen in England.
For the English people, also, those years contained a Declaration of
Independence; they brought us a title-deed of freedom greater, perhaps,
than the barons of the thirteenth century extorted from John—the
charter of a complete freedom in the daily utterance of public opinion.
The attempt here has been to indicate some of the partial equivalents
for such an utterance which may be traced in classical literature. A
student of antiquity must always in one sense, resemble the wistful
Florentine who, with Virgil for his guide, explored the threefold realm
beyond the grave. His converse is with the few, the spirits signal for
good or for evil in their time; the shades of the great soldiers pass
before him,—he can scan them closely, and imagine how each bore
himself in the hour of defeat or victory on earth; he can know the
counsels of statesmen, and even share the meditations of their
leisure; the poets and the philosophers are present: but around and
beyond these are the nameless nations of the dead, the multitudes who
passed through the ancient world and left no memorial. With these
dim populations he can hold no direct communion; it is much as if at
times the great movements which agitated them are descried by him as
the surging of a shadowy crowd, or if the accents of their anguish or
triumph are borne from afar as the sound of many waters. So much the
more, those few clear voices which still come from the past are never
more significant than when they interpret the popular mind of their
generation. The modern development of representative institutions
has invested the collective sentiment of communities with power of a
kind to which antiquity can furnish no proper parallel. But this fact
cannot dispense the student of history from listening for the echoes
of the market-place. And such attention cannot fail to quicken our
sense of the inestimable gain which has accrued to modern life through
journalism. It is easy to forget the magnitude of a benefit when its
operation has become regular and familiar. The influence of the press
may sometimes be abused; its tone may sometimes be objectionable.
But take these three things—quickness in seeking and supplying
information,—continual vigilance of comment,—electric sympathy of
social feeling: where in the ancient world do we find these things
as national characteristics, except in so far as they were gifts of
nature to the small community of ancient Athens—gifts to which her
best literature owes so much of its incomparable freshness and of
its imperishable charm? It is mainly due to the agency of the press
that these things are now found throughout the world,—these, which,
in all lands where man has risen above barbarism, are the surest
safeguards of civilization and the ultimate pledges of constitutional
freedom.—_Fortnightly Review._
THREE GLIMPSES OF A NEW ENGLAND VILLAGE.
Does the reader chance to know that bit of England round about
Haslemere, but an hour and a half’s journey from the heart of London,
where three counties meet, and the traveller may see at a glance, from
many a hill-top, the most rich and beautiful parts of Sussex, the
wildest and most picturesque of Surrey and Hampshire? At his feet lies
spread the weald of Sussex, whilst the dark wooded promontories and
long purple ridges of Blackdown, Marley, and Ironhill curve round or
jut out into this broad sea of fertility, and the distant South Downs
close the view with wavy outline and fluted sides, bare of everything
save fine turf, nibbling sheep, and the shadows of the clouds. Turning
round, Surrey culminates, as it were, in Hind Head, with triple
summit—no mere hill, but a miniature mountain in bold individuality of
form. And when he climbs this vantage-ground, Hampshire lies unfolded
before him as well as Surrey; Wolmer Forest—forest no longer, but
brown moorland; ranges of chalk hills, conspicuous among them one with
a white scar on its dark flank, which hides Selborne amid its trees;
solemn distances seen against the sunset sky, clothed with a deep
purple bloom, which haunt the memory like a strain of noble music.
No less beautiful and strikingly similar in general character is
that part of Western Massachusetts wherein stands our New England
village—Northampton—village in size and rural aspect, though the
capital of Hampshire county. But the New England valley has one
advantage over the weald of Sussex in its broad and beautiful river,
with Indian name, Connecticut—Quonnektacut, the long river—which
winds through it. Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom, the Sugar Loaf and the
Pelham range are its Blackdown, Marley, Hind Head, and South Downs.
These hills are a couple of hundred feet or so higher than their
English prototypes, ranging from 1000 to 1300 feet above the sea, and
their old ribs are of harder and more ancient stuff than the chalk and
greensand of the South Downs and Surrey hills; witness the granite or
rather gneiss boulders scattered broadcast over the land, sometimes in
rugged upright masses, looking like some grey ruin, sometimes in small
rounded fragments, bestrewing the uplands like a flock of sheep, and
more rarely the black and still harder blocks of trap. In the museum
at Amherst, just over the river, are preserved slabs with the famous
bird-tracks—colossal footprints two feet long, found in the trias of
this part of the Connecticut valley—all tending to prove that the sun
shone down upon dry land here for some ages whilst the mother-country
was still mostly a waste of waters; and that, geologically speaking,
and so far as these parts at any rate are concerned, New England is
old, and old England new, by comparison. Broad, fertile, level meadows
border the river, and the hills are richly clothed with chestnut,
birch, hemlock (somewhat like the yew in aspect), hickory (a kind of
walnut), beech, oak, etc. It is hard to say whether the likeness or the
unlikeness to an English landscape strikes the traveller more. There
is the all-pervading difference of a dry and brilliant atmosphere,
which modifies both form and color, substituting the sharp-edged and
definite for the vague and rounded in distant objects, and brilliancy
and distinctness of hue for depth and softness. Apart, too, from the
brilliant and searching light, the leaves are absolutely of a lighter
green, and grow in a less dense and solid mass; the foliage looks more
feathery, the tree more spiral. Especially is this so with the American
oak, which has neither the dome-like head, the sturdiness of bough, nor
the dark bluish-green foliage of the English oak. If it be spring-time,
no gorse is to be seen with golden blossom set among matted thorns,
perfuming the sunshine; but everywhere abounding masses of the delicate
pink-clustered, odorless, warlike kalmia, called there laurel, and
growing to the full size of our laurels; and more shyly hidden, the
lovely azalea or swamp-pink, as the country people call it. Instead of
the daisy, the delicate little Housatonia, like Venus’ looking-glass
but growing singly, stars the ground; and for fragrance we must
stoop down and seek the pale pink clusters of the trailing arbutus
or May-flower, which richly reward the seeker. In July we miss
the splendid purpling of the hills with heather blossom; but the
pink spikes of the hardhack abound; gay lilies, lady’s earrings,
blue-fringed gentians, glowing cardinal flowers (_Lobelia cardinalis_),
with slender petals of a deeper crimson than the salvia, and a host
more new friends, or old friends with new ways grown democratic as
befits them, scatter their beauty freely by the wayside and the margins
of the brooks, instead of setting up as exclusives of the garden.
Nor are the differences less marked in the aspect of the cultivated
land. The fertile valley has perhaps a look of greater breadth from
not being intersected with hedges and having few fences of any kind,
one crop growing beside another, and one owner’s beside another’s,
like different beds in a nursery-garden. But the effect of these large
undivided fields is to dwarf the appearance of the crops themselves.
The patches of tall tasselled Indian corn, the white-blossomed
buckwheat, and large-leaved tobacco, look diminutive. No haystacks, no
wheat-ricks are to be seen; only here and there a lonely, prison-like
tobacco barn or drying-house, full of narrow loopholes to let in air
without light. Everything else is housed in the big barn that adjoins
the farmhouse, which stands, not amid its own fields, but on the
outskirts of the nearest town or village. Of wheat little is grown;
of root-crops still less, for sheep-farming is not in favor. Tobacco,
with its large, glossy dark leaves, like those of the mangel-wurzel,
thrives well on the rich alluvial soil of the Connecticut valley; but,
fluctuating as it is in value, exhaustive of the soil, and easily
damaged by weather, the great gains of one year are often more than
counterbalanced by the losses of the next. The Indian corn remains
long upon the ground in autumn after it is cut, to ripen in stooks,
much as beans do with us; and then come to light the pumpkins which
were sown amongst it, and now lie basking and glowing in the sun
like giant oranges. Glowing, too, in the splendid sunshine, are the
apple-orchards, laden with fruit half as large and quite as red
as full-blown peonies. Never, even in the vale of Evesham or
Herefordshire, have I seen any so beautiful.
As to the living creatures—feathered, four legged, or no-legged—there
are some conspicuous differences which it does not take a naturalist
to discover. Ten to one, indeed, if we come upon a rattlesnake; but a
few are still left in snug corners of Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom, as
anxious to avoid us as we them. The lively little chipmunk, diminutive
first cousin to the squirrel, with black stripe along the back, is
sure to make our acquaintance, for his kind seems as multitudinous
as the rabbit with us, and is a worse foe to the farmer, because he
has more audacity and a taste for the kernels of things, instead of
merely the leaves. Strange new sounds greet the ear from katydid
“working her chromatic reed”; from bull-frog with deep low, almost a
roar; from grasshoppers and locusts, whose loud brassy whirr resounds
all through the sunny hours with such persistency it seems at last a
very part of the hot sunshine. The chirp of our grasshoppers is the
mere ghost of a sound in comparison. At night fireflies glance in and
out of the darkness; and, if we remain under the trees, mosquitoes
soon make us unpleasantly aware of their existence. As to the birds,
the flame-colored oriole, the delicately shaped blue-bird, flit by
now and then as flashes of surprise and delight from the south; the
rose-breasted grossbeak has a sweet note; the robin, not round as a
ball and fierce and saucy, but grown tall, and slim, and mild—his
breast not so red, his song not so sweet, his eye not so bright—is
there. He is indeed a robin only in name,—really a species of
thrush. A cheerful twittering, chirping, whistling, the tuning of the
orchestra, a short sweet snatch or two of song I heard; but the steady,
long-sustained outpour of rich melody from throats never weary, the
chorus trilling joyously, with which our woods and hedgerows resound
in spring and early summer, I listened for in vain. Perhaps the
pathlessness of the woods and hills prevented my penetrating to the
secluded haunts of the sweetest singers, such as the hermit-thrush, and
I speak only of New England. Remembering what John Burroughs has said
on the subject, I will not venture to generalize the comparison.
GLIMPSE THE FIRST.
About two hundred and forty years ago, towards the close of Cromwell’s
life, and thirty-four years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,
the Boston and Plymouth Settlement found itself vigorous enough to
send out offshoots; and having heard from the Dutch settlers of New
York of this rich and well-watered valley discovered by them in 1614,
the General Court appointed John Pynchon, Elizur Holyoke, and Samuel
Chapin of Springfield, settled seventeen years before, to negotiate
with the Indians for that tract of land called Nonotuck, where now
stand six small towns and villages, chief and first built of which was
Northampton. The price paid was a hundred fathoms of wampum (equal
to about £20), ten coats, some small gifts, and the ploughing up of
sixteen acres on the east side of the river. Wampum (Indian for white)
consisted of strings of beads made of white shells and _suckauhock_
black or blue money, of black or purple shells. Both were used for more
purposes than trading with the Indians, coin being scarce. Eight white
and four black beads were worth a penny; and a man as often took out
a string of beads as a purse to pay an innkeeper or a ferryman, or to
balance a trading account.
But Nonotuck was paid for with a good deal besides the wampum and
the ploughing. For a hundred and twenty-four years there was almost
incessant warfare with the Indians. Treacherous ambuscades lay in wait
for the trader on his journey, stealthy dark-skinned assassins for
the solitary husbandman, and not a few of these fertile fields were
watered by the blood of its first tillers. He carried his weapons with
him to his work and to the meeting-house, and expressed his gratitude
for hair-breadth escapes, Puritan fashion, by the pious names he gave
his children. Preserved Clapp, Submit Grout, Comfort Domo, Thankful
Medad, are names that figure in the records of this and the neighboring
villages; where we read also that one Praise-Ever Turner, and his
servant Uzackaby Shakspeare, were killed by the Indians. Within sight
of Northampton it was, just over the river, in the sister settlement
of Hadley,—that beautiful old village, with street eighteen rods
wide, set with a double avenue of superb elms, greensward in the
middle and a road on either side, looking more like the entrance to
a fine park than a village street,—here it was that a “deliverance”
occurred, long believed by the people to have been miraculous. One
Sunday, when nearly the whole scant population was gathered for worship
in the meeting-house, a large body of Indians fell upon them, and,
what with the panic and the want of a leader, all seemed lost, when
a majestic, venerable figure, dressed in a strange rich garb, fully
armed, appeared suddenly in their midst, assumed the command, rallied
their scattered numbers, and led them on to victory; then vanished as
suddenly as he had appeared, no man knew where or whence.[61] No man but
one—Mr. Russell, the minister. This venerable apparition was Goffe,
once a general in Cromwell’s army, and, like Whalley his companion in
exile, one of the judges who condemned Charles to death, now forced,
even in that far land, to hide for his life, since an active quest was
maintained, in obedience to the Home Government for both Goffe and
Whalley. For twelve years did good Mr. Russell shelter them, unknown
to all but his own family. Whalley died in his house; but Goffe
subsequently disappeared, and the rest of his career is unknown.
Altogether the hardy band found ample scope for carrying into practice
the noble maxim of the Pilgrim Fathers rehearsed at Leyden: “All great
and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and
must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.” In order
to secure protection from Indians and wolves, the little community
built its dwellings, not each isolated on its own farm-lands, but side
by side, so as to form at once the main street; each house having its
“home lot” or strip of “interval,” as the rich meadow-land stretching
down to the river was called, and its “wood-lot” on the hillside.
Having chosen her “select men to direct all the fundamental affairs
of the town, to prevent anything which they judge shall be of damage,
and to order anything which shall be for the good of the town; to
hear complaints, arbitrate controversies, lay out highways, see to
the scouring of ditches, the killing of wolves, and the training
of children,” Northampton proceeded at once to build herself a
meeting-house “of sawen timber 26 feet long and 18 feet wide,” for the
sum of £14 sterling, to be paid in work or corn. There was no clock in
the settlement; so the worshippers were called together, sometimes by
a large cow-bell, sometimes by drum, and finally by trumpet, for the
blowing of which Jedediah Strong had a salary of eighteen shillings
a year. There was no minister for some years; and more finding in
themselves a vocation for preaching than for listening, or at any rate
for criticising than for meekly imbibing, disputes arose, the General
Court was appealed to, and its decision enforced that the service
should consist, besides praying and singing, of “the reading aloud
of known godly and orthodox books;” and for those who failed to obey
with seemly decorum the summons of Mr. Jedediah Strong’s trumpet,
severe was the chastisement. Joe Leonard and Sam Harmon, for instance,
“who were seen to whip and whisk one another with a stick before the
meeting-house door,” were fined five shillings; and Daniel, “for
idle watching about and not coming to the ordinances of the Lord,”
was adjudged worthy of stripes to the number “of five, _well laid
on_.” In 1672 the town voted that there be some sticks set up in the
“meeting-house, with fit persons placed near, to use them as occasion
shall require, to keep the youth from disorder.” Which staves were
fitted with a hare’s foot at one end and his tail at the other; the
former to give a hard rap to misbehaving boys, the latter a gentle
reminder to sleeping women.
Something besides repression was done, however, for the benefit of
the youth of Northampton. The first school was started in 1663,—the
master to receive £6 a year and his charges for tuition. Bridges were
built and roads made by calling out every man to labor according to his
estate; and those who did not labor paid in grain at the rate
of half-a-crown a-day for exemption. For more than sixty years
Northampton had no doctor, only a “bone-setter”: on the whole, a lucky
circumstance, perhaps, considering what were the remedies then chiefly
in vogue. Sylvester Judd, from whose “History of Hadley,” and also
from Dr. Holland’s “History of Western Massachusetts,” the foregoing
details have been gathered, gives a curious list, taken from medical
prescriptions of the time:—the fat of a wild cat, blood of a goat, of
an ass, of a white pigeon taken from under the wing, the tongue and
lungs of a fox, liver of an eel and of a wolf, horns of a bug (beetle),
teeth of a sea-horse, bone from the heart of a stag, the left foot of a
tortoise, &c.
After the Indian and the French and Indian wars were over, there was
but a short interval of rest before the War of Independence began. The
long rugged battle with the savage and the wilderness had done its
work well in training men for the struggle which was to sunder all
bonds, and convert the colony into a new nation, master of its own
destiny. Northampton was not the scene of any battles; but bore its
part in furnishing some brave and leading men, and money, or money’s
worth, to the army. After the war was over, came a time of depression
and disorganization in public affairs and in trade, which culminated
hereabouts in what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, so named from its
leader; but it was soon quelled, and peace and prosperity settled down
upon Northampton and upon the whole land.
GLIMPSE THE SECOND.
If we lift a corner of the veil of time at the opening of the present
century, we find our handful of settlers become a population of
4000,—there was no immigration in those days to swell the numbers by
thousands and tens of thousands at a blow,—and possessed of resources
for their social and intellectual welfare pretty much on a par with
those of an English country town at that date of the same size: a
little behind still in material comforts and luxuries, a little ahead
in the amount of mental activity and the spirit of progress generated
partly by more complete self-dependence, by the great and stirring
times men had just passed through, and by hereditary influence from the
parent stock, which was the pick of Old England in these qualities.
The spirit of fellowship thrives where all are fellow-workers. There
comes, it would seem, a happy transition time between the struggles,
privations, isolation of the pioneers, and the wealth, luxury, and
poverty (grim skeleton in the cupboard of advancing prosperity),
when there yet remains a good measure of that sense of neighborship
necessarily developed, when no man is independent of the free help
and good-will of others, no man is born with a silver spoon in his
mouth,—a time, in short, when sociability is and “society” is not,
and those to whom the lines have fallen in pleasant places can stretch
out a friendly hand to the less fortunate without suspicion of
condescension or patronage.