The natural resources of the island were undeveloped. The tin mines of

Cornwall, which two thousand years before attracted the ships of the

merchant princes of Tyre beyond the Pillars of Hercules, were indeed

worked to a considerable extent; but the copper mines, which now yield

annually fifteen thousand tons, were entirely neglected. Rock salt was

known to exist, but was not used to any considerable extent; and only a

partial supply of salt by evaporation was obtained. The coal and iron of

England are at this time the stable foundations of her industrial and

commercial greatness. But in 1685 the great part of the iron used was

imported. Only about ten thousand tons were annually cast. Now eight

hundred thousand is the average annual production. Equally great has

been the increase in coal mining. "Coal," says Macaulay, "though very

little used in any species of manufacture, was already the ordinary fuel

in some districts which were fortunate enough to possess large beds, and

in the capital, which could easily be supplied by water carriage. It

seems reasonable to believe that at least one half of the quantity then

extracted from the pits was consumed in London. The consumption of

London seemed to the writers of that age enormous, and was often

mentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of the imperial city. They

scarcely hoped to be believed when they affirmed that two hundred and

eighty thousand chaldrons--that is to say, about three hundred and fifty

thousand tons-were, in the last year of the reign of Charles II., brought

to the Thames. At present near three millions and a half of tons are

required yearly by the metropolis; and the whole annual produce cannot,

on the most moderate computation, be estimated at less than twenty

millions of tons."

After thus passing in survey the England of our ancestors five or six

generations back, the author closes his chapter with some eloquent

remarks upon the progress of society. Contrasting the hardness and

coarseness of the age of which he treats with the softer and more humane

features of our own, he says: "Nowhere could be found that sensitive and

restless compassion which has in our time extended powerful protection to

the factory child, the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries into

the stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship; which winces at every

lash laid on the back of a drunken soldier; which will not suffer the

thief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked; and which has repeatedly

endeavored to save the life even of the murderer. The more we study the

annals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a merciful

age, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when

deserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. Every

class, doubtless, has gained largely by this great moral change; but the

class which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the

most defenceless."

The history itself properly commences at the close of this chapter.

Opening with the deathscene of the dissolute Charles II., it presents a

series of brilliant pictures of the events succeeding: The miserable fate

of Oates and Dangerfield, the perjured inventors of the Popish Plot; the

trial of Baxter by the infamous Jeffreys; the ill-starred attempt of the

Duke of Monmouth; the battle of Sedgemoor, and the dreadful atrocities of

the king's soldiers, and the horrible perversion of justice by the king's

chief judge in the "Bloody Assizes;" the barbarous hunting of the Scotch

Dissenters by Claverbouse; the melancholy fate of the brave and noble

Duke of Argyle,--are described with graphic power unknown to Smollett or

Hume. Personal portraits are sketched with a bold freedom which at times

startles us. The "old familiar faces," as we have seen them through the

dust of a century and a half, start before us with lifelike distinctness

of outline and coloring. Some of them disappoint us; like the ghost of

Hamlet's father, they come in a "questionable shape." Thus, for

instance, in his sketch of William Penn, the historian takes issue with

the world on his character, and labors through many pages of disingenuous

innuendoes and distortion of facts to transform the saint of history into

a pliant courtier.

The second volume details the follies and misfortunes, the decline and

fall, of the last of the Stuarts. All the art of the author's splendid

rhetoric is employed in awakening, by turns, the indignation and contempt

of the reader in contemplating the character of the wrong-headed king.

In portraying that character, he has brought into exercise all those

powers of invective and merciless ridicule which give such a savage

relish to his delineation of Barrere. To preserve the consistency of

this character, he denies the king any credit for whatever was really

beneficent and praiseworthy in his government. He holds up the royal

delinquent in only two lights: the one representing him as a tyrant

towards his people; the other as the abject slave of foreign priests,--

a man at once hateful and ludicrous, of whom it is difficult to speak

without an execration or a sneer.

The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguised

adherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration of

the despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of the

severity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing the

way for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughout

the British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priest

to build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palaces

of Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits and

prelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness. The secret springs of

the great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltry

instrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption,

prejudice, and falsehood. No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan of

Catholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in English

history without a feeling of disgust. However it may have been overruled

for good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness,

the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as little

cause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as the

substitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII., for

that of the Pope, in the English Church. It had little in common with

the revolution of 1642. The field of its action was the closet of

selfish intrigue,--the stalls of discontented prelates,--the chambers of

the wanton and adulteress,--the confessional of a weak prince, whose

mind, originally narrow, had been cramped closer still by the strait-

jacket of religious bigotry and superstition. The age of nobility and

heroism had well-nigh passed away. The pious fervor, the self-denial,

and the strict morality of the Puritanism of the days of Cromwell, and

the blunt honesty and chivalrous loyalty of the Cavaliers, had both

measurably given place to the corrupting influences of the licentious and

infidel court of Charles II.; and to the arrogance, intolerance, and

shameless self-seeking of a prelacy which, in its day of triumph and

revenge, had more than justified the terrible denunciations and scathing

gibes of Milton.

Both Catholic and Protestant writers have misrepresented James II. He

deserves neither the execrations of the one nor the eulogies of the

other. The candid historian must admit that he was, after all, a better

man than his brother Charles II. He was a sincere and bigoted Catholic,

and was undoubtedly honest in the declaration, which he made in that

unlucky letter which Burnet ferreted out on the Continent, that he was

prepared to make large steps to build up the Catholic Church in England,

and, if necessary, to become a martyr in her cause. He was proud,

austere, and self-willed. In the treatment of his enemies he partook of

the cruel temper of his time. He was at once ascetic and sensual,

alternating between the hair-shirt of penance and the embraces of

Catharine Sedley. His situation was one of the most difficult and

embarrassing which can be conceived of. He was at once a bigoted Papist

and a Protestant pope. He hated the French domination to which his

brother had submitted; yet his pride as sovereign was subordinated to his

allegiance to Rome and a superstitious veneration for the wily priests

with which Louis XIV. surrounded him. As the head of Anglican heretics,

he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereign

and the man. He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws against

the Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with its

ghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuits

and victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcely

ceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack by

Protestant inquisitors. He was torn by conflicting interests and

spiritual and political contradictions. The prelates of the Established

Church must share the responsibility of many of the worst acts of the

early part of his reign. Oxford sent up its lawned deputations to mingle

the voice of adulation with the groans of tortured Covenanters, and

fawning ecclesiastics burned the incense of irreverent flattery under the

nostrils of the Lord's anointed, while the blessed air of England was

tainted by the carcasses of the ill-fated followers of Monmouth, rotting

on a thousand gibbets. While Jeffreys was threatening Baxter and his

Presbyterian friends with the pillory and whipping-post; while Quakers

and Baptists were only spared from extermination as game preserves for

the sport of clerical hunters; while the prisons were thronged with the

heads of some fifteen thousand beggared families, and Dissenters of every

name and degree were chased from one hiding-place to another, like David

among the cliffs of Ziph and the rocks of the wild goats,--the

thanksgivings and congratulations of prelacy arose in an unbroken strain

of laudation from all the episcopal palaces of England. What mattered it

to men, in whose hearts, to use the language of John Milton, "the sour

leaven of human traditions, mixed with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisy,

lay basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion, hatching

Antichrist," that the privileges of Englishmen and the rights secured by

the great charter were violated and trodden under foot, so long as

usurpation enured to their own benefit? But when King James issued his

Declaration of Indulgence, and stretched his prerogative on the side of

tolerance and charity, the zeal of the prelates for preserving the

integrity of the British constitution and the limiting of the royal power

flamed up into rebellion. They forswore themselves without scruple: the

disciples of Laud, the asserters of kingly infallibility and divine

right, talked of usurped power and English rights in the strain of the

very schismatics whom they had persecuted to the death. There is no

reason to believe that James supposed that, in issuing his declaration

suspending the penal laws, he had transcended the rightful prerogative of

his throne. The power which he exercised had been used by his

predecessors for far less worthy purposes, and with the approbation of

many of the very men who now opposed him. His ostensible object,

expressed in language which even those who condemn his policy cannot but

admire, was a laudable and noble one. "We trust," said he, "that it will

not be vain that we have resolved to use our utmost endeavors to

establish liberty of conscience on such just and equal foundations as

will render it unalterable, and secure to all people the free exercise of

their religion, by which future ages may reap the benefit of what is so

undoubtedly the general good of the whole kingdom." Whatever may have

been the motive of this declaration,--even admitting the suspicions of

his enemies to have been true, that he advocated universal toleration as

the only means of restoring Roman Catholics to all the rights and

privileges of which the penal laws deprived them,--it would seem that

there could have been no very serious objection on the part of real

friends of religious toleration to the taking of him at his word and

placing Englishmen of every sect on an equality before the law. The

Catholics were in a very small minority, scarcely at that time as

numerous as the Quakers and Anabaptists. The army, the navy, and nine

tenths of the people of England were Protestants. Real danger,

therefore, from a simple act of justice towards their Catholic fellow-

citizens, the people of England had no ground for apprehending. But the

great truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughout

Christendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, and

not between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience is

sacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of the

seventeenth century. Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted the

Catholics from his plan of toleration. Locke, yielding to the prejudices

of the time, took the same ground. The enlightened latitudinarian

ministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christian

charity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day of

its greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universal

toleration. The Presbyterians excluded Quakers, Baptists, and Papists

from the pale of their charity. With the single exception of the sect of

which William Penn was a conspicuous member, the idea of complete and

impartial toleration was novel and unwelcome to all sects and classes of

the English people. Hence it was that the very men whose liberties and

estates had been secured by the declaration, and who were thereby

permitted to hold their meetings in peace and quietness, used their newly

acquired freedom in denouncing the king, because the same key which had

opened their prison doors had also liberated the Papists and the Quakers.

Baxter's severe and painful spirit could not rejoice in an act which had,

indeed, restored him to personal freedom, but which had, in his view,

also offended Heaven, and strengthened the powers of Antichrist by

extending the same favor to Jesuits and Ranters. Bunyan disliked the

Quakers next to the Papists; and it greatly lessened his satisfaction at

his release from Bedford jail that it had been brought about by the

influence of the former at the court of a Catholic prince. Dissenters

forgot the wrongs and persecutions which they had experienced at the

hands of the prelacy, and joined the bishops in opposition to the

declaration. They almost magnified into Christian confessors the

prelates who remonstrated against the indulgence, and actually plotted

against the king for restoring them to liberty of person and conscience.

The nightmare fear of Popery overcame their love of religious liberty;

and they meekly offered their necks to the yoke of prelacy as the only

security against the heavier one of Papist supremacy. In a far different

manner the cleareyed and plain-spoken John Milton met the claims and

demands of the hierarchy in his time. "They entreat us," said he, "that

we be not weary of the insupportable grievances that our shoulders have

hitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we think them fit to be our

justices of peace, our lords, our highest officers of state. They pray

us that it would please us to let them still haul us and wrong us with

their bandogs and pursuivants; and that it would please the Parliament

that they may yet have the whipping, fleecing, and flaying of us in their

diabolical courts, to tear the flesh from our bones, and into our wide

wounds, instead of balm, to pour in the oil of tartar, vitriol, and

mercury. Surely a right, reasonable, innocent, and soft-hearted

petition! O the relenting bowels of the fathers!"

Considering the prominent part acted by William Penn in the reign of

James II., and his active and influential support of the obnoxious

declaration which precipitated the revolution of 1688, it could hardly

have been otherwise than that his character should suffer from the

unworthy suspicions and prejudices of his contemporaries. His views of

religious toleration were too far in advance of the age to be received

with favor. They were of necessity misunderstood and misrepresented.

All his life he had been urging them with the earnestness of one whose

convictions were the result, not so much of human reason as of what he

regarded as divine illumination. What the council of James yielded upon

grounds of state policy he defended on those of religious obligation.

He had suffered in person and estate for the exercise of his religion.

He had travelled over Holland and Germany, pleading with those in

authority for universal toleration and charity. On a sudden, on the

accession of James, the friend of himself and his family, he found

himself the most influential untitled citizen in the British realm.

He had free access to the royal ear. Asking nothing for himself or his

relatives, he demanded only that the good people of England should be no

longer despoiled of liberty and estate for their religious opinions.

James, as a Catholic, had in some sort a common interest with his

dissenting subjects, and the declaration was for their common relief.

Penn, conscious of the rectitude of his own motives and thoroughly

convinced of the Christian duty of toleration, welcomed that declaration

as the precursor of the golden age of liberty and love and good-will to

men. He was not the man to distrust the motives of an act so fully in

accordance with his lifelong aspirations and prayers. He was charitable

to a fault: his faith in his fellow-men was often stronger than a clearer

insight of their characters would have justified. He saw the errors of

the king, and deplored them; he denounced Jeffreys as a butcher who had

been let loose by the priests; and pitied the king, who was, he thought,

swayed by evil counsels. He remonstrated against the interference of the

king with Magdalen College; and reproved and rebuked the hopes and aims

of the more zealous and hot-headed Catholics, advising them to be content

with simple toleration. But the constitution of his mind fitted him

rather for the commendation of the good than the denunciation of the bad.

He had little in common with the bold and austere spirit of the Puritan

reformers. He disliked their violence and harshness; while, on the other

hand, he was attracted and pleased by the gentle disposition and mild

counsels of Locke, and Tillotson, and the latitudinarians of the English

Church. He was the intimate personal and political friend of Algernon

Sydney; sympathized with his republican theories, and shared his

abhorrence of tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical. He found in him a man

after his own heart,--genial, generous, and loving; faithful to duty and

the instincts of humanity; a true Christian gentleman. His sense of

gratitude was strong, and his personal friendships sometimes clouded his

judgment. In giving his support to the measures of James in behalf of

liberty of conscience, it must be admitted that he acted in consistency

with his principles and professions. To have taken ground against them,

he must have given the lie to his declarations from his youth upward. He

could not disown and deny his own favorite doctrine because it came from

the lips of a Catholic king and his Jesuit advisers; and in thus rising

above the prejudices of his time, and appealing to the reason and

humanity of the people of England in favor of a cordial indorsement on

the part of Parliament of the principles of the declaration, he believed

that he was subserving the best interests of his beloved country and

fulfilling the solemn obligations of religious duty. The downfall of

James exposed Penn to peril and obloquy. Perjured informers endeavored

to swear away his life; and, although nothing could be proved against him

beyond the fact that he had steadily supported the great measure of

toleration, he was compelled to live secluded in his private lodgings in

London for two or three years, with a proclamation for his arrest hanging

over his head. At length, the principal informer against him having been

found guilty of perjury, the government warrant was withdrawn; and Lords

Sidney, Rochester, and Somers, and the Duke of Buckingham, publicly bore

testimony that nothing had been urged against him save by impostors, and

that "they had known him, some of them, for thirty years, and had never

known him to do an ill thing, but many good offices." It is a matter of

regret that one professing to hold the impartial pen of history should

have given the sanction of his authority to the slanderous and false

imputations of such a man as Burnet, who has never been regarded as an

authentic chronicler. The pantheon of history should not be lightly

disturbed. A good man's character is the world's common legacy; and

humanity is not so rich in models of purity and goodness as to be able to

sacrifice such a reputation as that of William Penn to the point of an

antithesis or the effect of a paradox.

Gilbert Burnet, in liberality as a politician and tolerance as a

Churchman, was far in advance of his order and time. It is true

that he shut out the Catholics from the pale of his charity and

barely tolerated the Dissenters. The idea of entire religious

liberty and equality shocked even his moderate degree of

sensitiveness. He met Penn at the court of the Prince of Orange,

and, after a long and fruitless effort to convince the Dissenter

that the penal laws against the Catholics should be enforced, and

allegiance to the Established Church continue the condition of

qualification for offices of trust and honor, and that he and his

friends should rest contented with simple toleration, he became

irritated by the inflexible adherence of Penn to the principle of

entire religious freedom. One of the most worthy sons of the

Episcopal Church, Thomas Clarkson, alluding to this discussion, says

"Burnet never mentioned him (Penn) afterwards but coldly or

sneeringly, or in a way to lower him in the estimation of the

reader, whenever he had occasion to speak of him in his History of

his Own Times."

He was a man of strong prejudices; he lived in the midst of

revolutions, plots, and intrigues; he saw much of the worst side of

human nature; and he candidly admits, in the preface to his great

work, that he was inclined to think generally the worst of men and

parties, and that the reader should make allowance for this

inclination, although he had honestly tried to give the truth. Dr.

King, of Oxford, in his Anecdotes of his Own Times, p. 185, says:

"I knew Burnet: he was a furious party-man, and easily imposed upon

by any lying spirit of his faction; but he was a better pastor than

any man who is now seated on the bishops' bench." The Tory writers

--Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and others--have undoubtedly exaggerated

the defects of Burnet's narrative; while, on the other hand, his

Whig commentators have excused them on the ground of his avowed and

fierce partisanship. Dr. Johnson, in his blunt way, says: "I do not

believe Burnet intentionally lied; but he was so much prejudiced

that he took no pains to find out the truth." On the contrary, Sir

James Mackintosh, in the Edinburgh Review, speaks of the Bishop as

an honest writer, seldom substantially erroneous, though often

inaccurate in points of detail; and Macaulay, who has quite too

closely followed him in his history, defends him as at least quite

as accurate as his contemporary writers, and says that, "in his

moral character, as in his intellectual, great blemishes were more

than compensated by great excellences."

THE BORDER WAR OF 1708.

The picturesque site of the now large village of Haverhill, on the

Merrimac River, was occupied a century and a half ago by some thirty

dwellings, scattered at unequal distances along the two principal roads,

one of which, running parallel with the river, intersected the other,

which ascended the hill northwardly and lost itself in the dark woods.

The log huts of the first settlers had at that time given place to

comparatively spacious and commodious habitations, framed and covered

with sawed boards, and cloven clapboards, or shingles. They were, many

of them, two stories in front, with the roof sloping off behind to a

single one; the windows few and small, and frequently so fitted as to be

opened with difficulty, and affording but a scanty supply of light and

air. Two or three of the best constructed were occupied as garrisons,

where, in addition to the family, small companies of soldiers were

quartered. On the high grounds rising from the river stood the mansions

of the well-defined aristocracy of the little settlement,--larger and

more imposing, with projecting upper stories and carved cornices. On the

front of one of these, over the elaborately wrought entablature of the

doorway, might be seen the armorial bearings of the honored family of

Saltonstall. Its hospitable door was now closed; no guests filled its

spacious hall or partook of the rich delicacies of its ample larder.

Death had been there; its venerable and respected occupant had just been

borne by his peers in rank and station to the neighboring graveyard.

Learned, affable, intrepid, a sturdy asserter of the rights and liberties

of the Province, and so far in advance of his time as to refuse to yield

to the terrible witchcraft delusion, vacating his seat on the bench and

openly expressing his disapprobation of the violent and sanguinary

proceedings of the court, wise in council and prompt in action,--not his

own townsmen alone, but the people of the entire Province, had reason to

mourn the loss of Nathaniel Saltonstall.

Four years before the events of which we are about to speak, the Indian

allies of the French in Canada suddenly made their appearance in the

westerly part of the settlement. At the close of a midwinter day six

savages rushed into the open gate of a garrison-house owned by one

Bradley, who appears to have been absent at the time. A sentinel,

stationed in the house, discharged his musket, killing the foremost

Indian, and was himself instantly shot down. The mistress of the house,

a spirited young woman, was making soap in a large kettle over the fire.

--She seized her ladle and dashed the boiling liquid in the faces of the

assailants, scalding one of them severely, and was only captured after

such a resistance as can scarcely be conceived of by the delicately

framed and tenderly nurtured occupants of the places of our great-

grandmothers. After plundering the house, the Indians started on their

long winter march for Canada. Tradition says that some thirteen persons,

probably women and children, were killed outright at the garrison.

Goodwife Bradley and four others were spared as prisoners. The ground

was covered with deep snow, and the captives were compelled to carry

heavy burdens of their plundered household-stuffs; while for many days in

succession they had no other sustenance than bits of hide, ground-nuts,

the bark of trees, and the roots of wild onions, and lilies. In this

situation, in the cold, wintry forest, and unattended, the unhappy young

woman gave birth to a child. Its cries irritated the savages, who

cruelly treated it and threatened its life. To the entreaties of the

mother they replied, that they would spare it on the condition that it

should be baptized after their fashion. She gave the little innocent

into their hands, when with mock solemnity they made the sign of the

cross upon its forehead, by gashing it with their knives, and afterwards

barbarously put it to death before the eyes of its mother, seeming to

regard the whole matter as an excellent piece of sport. Nothing so

strongly excited the risibilities of these grim barbarians as the tears

and cries of their victims, extorted by physical or mental agony.

Capricious alike in their cruelties and their kindnesses, they treated

some of their captives with forbearance and consideration and tormented

others apparently without cause. One man, on his way to Canada, was

killed because they did not like his looks, "he was so sour;" another,

because he was "old and good for nothing." One of their own number, who

was suffering greatly from the effects of the scalding soap, was derided

and mocked as a "fool who had let a squaw whip him;" while on the other

hand the energy and spirit manifested by Goodwife Bradley in her defence

was a constant theme of admiration, and gained her so much respect among

her captors as to protect her from personal injury or insult. On her

arrival in Canada she was sold to a French farmer, by whom she was kindly

treated.

In the mean time her husband made every exertion in his power to

ascertain her fate, and early in the next year learned that she was a

slave in Canada. He immediately set off through the wilderness on foot,

accompanied only by his dog, who drew a small sled, upon which he carried

some provisions for his sustenance, and a bag of snuff, which the

Governor of the Province gave him as a present to the Governor of Canada.

After encountering almost incredible hardships and dangers with a

perseverance which shows how well he appreciated the good qualities of

his stolen helpmate, he reached Montreal and betook himself to the

Governor's residence. Travel-worn, ragged, and wasted with cold and

hunger, he was ushered into the presence of M. Vaudreuil. The courtly

Frenchman civilly received the gift of the bag of snuff, listened to the

poor fellow's story, and put him in a way to redeem his wife without

difficulty. The joy of the latter on seeing her husband in the strange

land of her captivity may well be imagined. They returned by water,

landing at Boston early in the summer.

There is a tradition that this was not the goodwife's first experience of

Indian captivity. The late Dr. Abiel Abbott, in his manuscript of Judith

Whiting's _Recollections of the Indian Wars_, states that she had

previously been a prisoner, probably before her marriage. After her

return she lived quietly at the garrison-house until the summer of the

next year. One bright moonlit-night a party of Indians were seen

silently and cautiously approaching. The only occupants of the garrison

at that time were Bradley, his wife and children, and a servant. The

three adults armed themselves with muskets, and prepared to defend

themselves. Goodwife Bradley, supposing the Indians had come with the

intention of again capturing her, encouraged her husband to fight to the

last, declaring that she had rather die on her own hearth than fall into

their hands. The Indians rushed upon the garrison, and assailed the

thick oaken door, which they forced partly open, when a well-aimed shot

from Goodwife Bradley laid the foremost dead on the threshold. The loss

of their leader so disheartened them that they made a hasty retreat.

The year 1707 passed away without any attack upon the exposed frontier

settlement. A feeling of comparative security succeeded to the almost

sleepless anxiety and terror of the inhabitants; and they were beginning

to congratulate each other upon the termination of their long and bitter

trials. But the end was not yet.

Early in the spring of 1708, the principal tribes of Indians in alliance

with the French held a great council, and agreed to furnish three hundred

warriors for an expedition to the English frontier.

They were joined by one hundred French Canadians and several volunteers,

consisting of officers of the French army, and younger sons of the

nobility, adventurous and unscrupulous. The Sieur de Chaillons, and

Hertel de Rouville, distinguished as a partisan in former expeditions,

cruel and unsparing as his Indian allies, commanded the French troops;

the Indians, marshalled under their several chiefs, obeyed the general

orders of La Perriere. A Catholic priest accompanied them. De Ronville,

with the French troops and a portion of the Indians, took the route by

the River St. Francois about the middle of summer. La Perriere, with the

French Mohawks, crossed Lake Champlain. The place of rendezvous was Lake

Nickisipigue. On the way a Huron accidentally killed one of his

companions; whereupon the tribe insisted on halting and holding a

council. It was gravely decided that this accident was an evil omen, and

that the expedition would prove disastrous; and, in spite of the

endeavors of the French officers, the whole band deserted. Next the

Mohawks became dissatisfied, and refused to proceed. To the entreaties

and promises of their French allies they replied that an infectious

disease had broken out among them, and that, if they remained, it would

spread through the whole army. The French partisans were not deceived by

a falsehood so transparent; but they were in no condition to enforce

obedience; and, with bitter execrations and reproaches, they saw the

Mohawks turn back on their warpath. The diminished army pressed on to

Nickisipigue, in the expectation of meeting, agreeably to their promise,

the Norridgewock and Penobscot Indians. They found the place deserted,

and, after waiting for some days, were forced to the conclusion that the

Eastern tribes had broken their pledge of cooperation. Under these

circumstances a council was held; and the original design of the

expedition, namely, the destruction of the whole line of frontier towns,

beginning with Portsmouth, was abandoned. They had still a sufficient

force for the surprise of a single settlement; and Haverhill, on the

Merrimac, was selected for conquest.

In the mean time, intelligence of the expedition, greatly exaggerated in

point of numbers and object, had reached Boston, and Governor Dudley had

despatched troops to the more exposed out posts of the Provinces of

Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Forty men, under the command of Major

Turner and Captains Price and Gardner, were stationed at Haverhill in the

different garrison-houses. At first a good degree of vigilance was

manifested; but, as days and weeks passed without any alarm, the

inhabitants relapsed into their old habits; and some even began to

believe that the rumored descent of the Indians was only a pretext for

quartering upon them two-score of lazy, rollicking soldiers, who

certainly seemed more expert in making love to their daughters, and

drinking their best ale and cider, than in patrolling the woods or

putting the garrisons into a defensible state. The grain and hay harvest

ended without disturbance; the men worked in their fields, and the women

pursued their household avocations, without any very serious apprehension

of danger.

Among the inhabitants of the village was an eccentric, ne'er-do-well

fellow, named Keezar, who led a wandering, unsettled life, oscillating,

like a crazy pendulum, between Haverhill and Amesbury. He had a

smattering of a variety of trades, was a famous wrestler, and for a mug

of ale would leap over an ox-cart with the unspilled beverage in his

hand. On one occasion, when at supper, his wife complained that she had

no tin dishes; and, as there were none to be obtained nearer than Boston,

he started on foot in the evening, travelled through the woods to the

city, and returned with his ware by sunrise the next morning, passing

over a distance of between sixty and seventy miles. The tradition of his

strange habits, feats of strength, and wicked practical jokes is still

common in his native town. On the morning of the 29th of the eighth

month he was engaged in taking home his horse, which, according to his

custom, he had turned into his neighbor's rich clover field the evening

previous. By the gray light of dawn he saw a long file of men marching

silently towards the town. He hurried back to the village and gave the

alarm by firing a gun. Previous to this, however, a young man belonging

to a neighboring town, who had been spending the night with a young woman

of the village, had met the advance of the war-party, and, turning back

in extreme terror and confusion, thought only of the safety of his

betrothed, and passed silently through a considerable part of the village

to her dwelling. After he had effectually concealed her he ran out to

give the alarm. But it was too late. Keezar's gun was answered by the

terrific yells, whistling, and whooping of the Indians. House after

house was assailed and captured. Men, women, and children were

massacred. The minister of the town was killed by a shot through his

door. Two of his children were saved by the courage and sagacity of his

negro slave Hagar. She carried them into the cellar and covered them

with tubs, and then crouched behind a barrel of meat just in time to

escape the vigilant eyes of the enemy, who entered the cellar and

plundered it. She saw them pass and repass the tubs under which the

children lay and take meat from the very barrel which concealed herself.

Three soldiers were quartered in the house; but they made no defence, and

were killed while begging for quarter.

The wife of Thomas Hartshorne, after her husband and three sons had

fallen, took her younger children into the cellar, leaving an infant on a

bed in the garret, fearful that its cries would betray her place of

concealment if she took it with her. The Indians entered the garret and

tossed the child out of the window upon a pile of clapboards, where it

was afterwards found stunned and insensible. It recovered, nevertheless,

and became a man of remarkable strength and stature; and it used to be a

standing joke with his friends that he had been stinted by the Indians

when they threw him out of the window. Goodwife Swan, armed with a long

spit, successfully defended her door against two Indians. While the

massacre went on, the priest who accompanied the expedition, with some of

the French officers, went into the meeting-house, the walls of which were

afterwards found written over with chalk. At sunrise, Major Turner, with

a portion of his soldiers, entered the village; and the enemy made a

rapid retreat, carrying with them seventeen, prisoners. They were

pursued and overtaken just as they were entering the woods; and a severe

skirmish took place, in which the rescue of some of the prisoners was

effected. Thirty of the enemy were left dead on the field, including the

infamous Hertel de Rouville. On the part of the villagers, Captains Ayer

and Wainwright and Lieutenant Johnson, with thirteen others, were killed.

The intense heat of the weather made it necessary to bury the dead on the

same day. They were laid side by side in a long trench in the burial-

ground. The body of the venerated and lamented minister, with those of

his wife and child, sleep in another part of the burial-ground, where may

still be seen a rude monument with its almost llegible inscription:--

"_Clauditur hoc tumulo corpus Reverendi pii doctique viri D. Benjamin

Rolfe, ecclesiae Christi quae est in Haverhill pastoris fidelissimi; qui

domi suae ab hostibus barbare trucidatus. A laboribus suis requievit

mane diei sacrae quietis, Aug. XXIX, anno Dom. MDCCVIII. AEtatis suae

XLVI_."

Of the prisoners taken, some escaped during the skirmish, and two or

three were sent back by the French officers, with a message to the

English soldiers, that, if they pursued the party on their retreat to

Canada, the other prisoners should be put to death. One of them, a

soldier stationed in Captain Wainwright's garrison, on his return four

years after, published an account of his captivity. He was compelled to

carry a heavy pack, and was led by an Indian by a cord round his neck.

The whole party suffered terribly from hunger. On reaching Canada the

Indians shaved one side of his head, and greased the other, and painted

his face. At a fort nine miles from Montreal a council was held in order

to decide his fate; and he had the unenviable privilege of listening to a

protracted discussion upon the expediency of burning him. The fire was

already kindled, and the poor fellow was preparing to meet his doom with

firmness, when it was announced to him that his life was spared. This

result of the council by no means satisfied the women and boys, who had

anticipated rare sport in the roasting of a white man and a heretic. One

squaw assailed him with a knife and cut off one of his fingers; another

beat him with a pole. The Indians spent the night in dancing and

singing, compelling their prisoner to go round the ring with them. In

the morning one of their orators made a long speech to him, and formally

delivered him over to an old squaw, who took him to her wigwam and

treated him kindly. Two or three of the young women who were carried

away captive married Frenchmen in Canada and never returned. Instances

of this kind were by no means rare during the Indian wars. The simple

manners, gayety, and social habits of the French colonists among whom the

captives were dispersed seem to have been peculiarly fascinating to the

daughters of the grave and severe Puritans.

At the beginning of the present century, Judith Whiting was the solitary

survivor of all who witnessed the inroad of the French and Indians in

1708. She was eight years of age at the time of the attack, and her

memory of it to the last was distinct and vivid. Upon her old brain,

from whence a great portion of the records of the intervening years had

been obliterated, that terrible picture, traced with fire and blood,

retained its sharp outlines and baleful colors.

THE GREAT IPSWICH FRIGHT.

"The Frere into the dark gazed forth;

The sounds went onward towards the north

The murmur of tongues, the tramp and tread

Of a mighty army to battle led."

BALLAD OF THE CID.

Life's tragedy and comedy are never far apart. The ludicrous and the

sublime, the grotesque and the pathetic, jostle each other on the stage;

the jester, with his cap and bells, struts alongside of the hero; the

lord mayor's pageant loses itself in the mob around Punch and Judy; the

pomp and circumstance of war become mirth-provoking in a militia muster;

and the majesty of the law is ridiculous in the mock dignity of a

justice's court. The laughing philosopher of old looked on one side of

life and his weeping contemporary on the other; but he who has an eye to

both must often experience that contrariety of feeling which Sterne

compares to "the contest in the moist eyelids of an April morning,

whether to laugh or cry."

The circumstance we are about to relate, may serve as an illustration of

the way in which the woof of comedy interweaves with the warp of tragedy.

It occurred in the early stages of the American Revolution, and is part

and parcel of its history in the northeastern section of Massachusetts.

About midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport, the

traveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and the

sea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs and

venerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping off

to the seaside, forms a green background. This is Ipswich, the ancient

Agawam; one of those steady, conservative villages, of which a few are

still left in New England, wherein a contemporary of Cotton Mather and

Governor Endicott, were he permitted to revisit the scenes of his painful

probation, would scarcely feel himself a stranger. Law and Gospel,

embodied in an orthodox steeple and a court-house, occupy the steep,

rocky eminence in its midst; below runs the small river under its

picturesque stone bridge; and beyond is the famous female seminary, where

Andover theological students are wont to take unto themselves wives of

the daughters of the Puritans. An air of comfort and quiet broods over

the whole town. Yellow moss clings to the seaward sides of the roofs;

one's eyes are not endangered by the intense glare of painted shingles

and clapboards. The smoke of hospitable kitchens curls up through the

overshadowing elms from huge-throated chimneys, whose hearth-stones have

been worn by the feet of many generations. The tavern was once renowned

throughout New England, and it is still a creditable hostelry. During

court time it is crowded with jocose lawyers, anxious clients, sleepy

jurors, and miscellaneous hangers on; disinterested gentlemen, who have

no particular business of their own in court, but who regularly attend

its sessions, weighing evidence, deciding upon the merits of a lawyer's

plea or a judge's charge, getting up extempore trials upon the piazza or

in the bar-room of cases still involved in the glorious uncertainty of

the law in the court-house, proffering gratuitous legal advice to

irascible plaintiffs and desponding defendants, and in various other ways

seeing that the Commonwealth receives no detriment. In the autumn old

sportsmen make the tavern their headquarters while scouring the marshes

for sea-birds; and slim young gentlemen from the city return thither with

empty game-bags, as guiltless in respect to the snipes and wagtails as

Winkle was in the matter of the rooks, after his shooting excursion at

Dingle Dell. Twice, nay, three times, a year, since third parties have

been in fashion, the delegates of the political churches assemble in

Ipswich to pass patriotic resolutions, and designate the candidates whom

the good people of Essex County, with implicit faith in the wisdom of the

selection, are expected to vote for. For the rest there are pleasant

walks and drives around the picturesque village. The people are noted

for their hospitality; in summer the sea-wind blows cool over its healthy

hills, and, take it for all in all, there is not a better preserved or

pleasanter specimen of a Puritan town remaining in the ancient

Commonwealth.

The 21st of April, 1775, witnessed an awful commotion in the little

village of Ipswich. Old men, and boys, (the middle-aged had marched to

Lexington some days before) and all the women in the place who were not

bedridden or sick, came rushing as with one accord to the green in front

of the meeting-house. A rumor, which no one attempted to trace or

authenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landed

on the coast and were marching upon the town. A scene of indescribable

terror and confusion followed. Defence was out of the question, as the

young and able-bodied men of the entire region round about had marched to

Cambridge and Lexington. The news of the battle at the latter place,

exaggerated in all its details, had been just received; terrible stories

of the atrocities committed by the dreaded "regulars" had been related;

and it was believed that nothing short of a general extermination of the

patriots--men, women, and children--was contemplated by the British

commander.--Almost simultaneously the people of Beverly, a village a few

miles distant, were smitten with the same terror. How the rumor was

communicated no one could tell. It was there believed that the enemy had

fallen upon Ipswich, and massacred the inhabitants without regard to age

or sex.

It was about the middle of the afternoon of this day that the people of

Newbury, ten miles farther north, assembled in an informal meeting, at

the town-house to hear accounts from the Lexington fight, and to consider

what action was necessary in consequence of that event. Parson Carey was

about opening the meeting with prayer when hurried hoof-beats sounded up

the street, and a messenger, loose-haired and panting for breath, rushed

up the staircase. "Turn out, turn out, for God's sake," he cried, "or

you will be all killed! The regulars are marching onus; they are at

Ipswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!" Universal

consternation was the immediate result of this fearful announcement;

Parson Carey's prayer died on his lips; the congregation dispersed over

the town, carrying to every house the tidings that the regulars had come.

Men on horseback went galloping up and down the streets, shouting the

alarm. Women and children echoed it from every corner. The panic became

irresistible, uncontrollable. Cries were heard that the dreaded invaders

had reached Oldtown Bridge, a little distance from the village, and that

they were killing all whom they encountered. Flight was resolved upon.

All the horses and vehicles in the town were put in requisition; men,

women, and children hurried as for life towards the north. Some threw

their silver and pewter ware and other valuables into wells. Large

numbers crossed the Merrimac, and spent the night in the deserted houses

of Salisbury, whose inhabitants, stricken by the strange terror, had fled

into New Hampshire, to take up their lodgings in dwellings also abandoned

by their owners. A few individuals refused to fly with the multitude;

some, unable to move by reason of sickness, were left behind by their

relatives. One old gentleman, whose excessive corpulence rendered

retreat on his part impossible, made a virtue of necessity; and, seating

himself in his doorway with his loaded king's arm, upbraided his more

nimble neighbors, advising them to do as he did, and "stop and shoot the

devils." Many ludicrous instances of the intensity of the terror might

be related. One man got his family into a boat to go to Ram Island for

safety. He imagined he was pursued by the enemy through the dusk of the

evening, and was annoyed by the crying of an infant in the after part of

the boat. "Do throw that squalling brat overboard," he called to his

wife, "or we shall be all discovered and killed!" A poor woman ran four

or five miles up the river, and stopped to take breath and nurse her

child, when she found to her great horror that she had brought off the

cat instead of the baby!

All through that memorable night the terror swept onward towards the

north with a speed which seems almost miraculous, producing everywhere

the same results. At midnight a horseman, clad only in shirt and

breeches, dashed by our grandfather's door, in Haverhill, twenty miles up

the river. "Turn out! Get a musket! Turn out!" he shouted; "the

regulars are landing on Plum Island!" "I'm glad of it," responded the

old gentleman from his chamber window; "I wish they were all there, and

obliged to stay there." When it is understood that Plum Island is little

more than a naked sand-ridge, the benevolence of this wish can be readily

appreciated.

All the boats on the river were constantly employed for several hours in

conveying across the terrified fugitives. Through "the dead waste and

middle of the night" they fled over the border into New Hampshire. Some

feared to take the frequented roads, and wandered over wooded hills and

through swamps where the snows of the late winter had scarcely melted.

They heard the tramp and outcry of those behind them, and fancied that

the sounds were made by pursuing enemies. Fast as they fled, the terror,

by some unaccountable means, outstripped them. They found houses

deserted and streets strewn with household stuffs, abandoned in the hurry

of escape. Towards morning, however, the tide partially turned. Grown

men began to feel ashamed of their fears. The old Anglo-Saxon hardihood

paused and looked the terror in its face. Single or in small parties,

armed with such weapons as they found at hand,--among which long poles,

sharpened and charred at the end, were conspicuous,--they began to

retrace their steps. In the mean time such of the good people of Ipswich

as were unable or unwilling to leave their homes became convinced that

the terrible rumor which had nearly depopulated their settlement was

unfounded.

Among those who had there awaited the onslaught of the regulars was a

young man from Exeter, New Hampshire. Becoming satisfied that the whole

matter was a delusion, he mounted his horse and followed after the

retreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook. Late at night

he reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleepless

inhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode the

welcome tidings. The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, worn

with excitement and fatigue, slowly returning homeward, their

satisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasant

consciousness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting.

Any inference which might be drawn from the foregoing narrative

derogatory to the character of the people of New England at that day, on

the score of courage, would be essentially erroneous. It is true, they

were not the men to court danger or rashly throw away their lives for the

mere glory of the sacrifice. They had always a prudent and wholesome

regard to their own comfort and safety; they justly looked upon sound

heads and limbs as better than broken ones; life was to them too serious

and important, and their hard-gained property too valuable, to be lightly

hazarded. They never attempted to cheat themselves by under-estimating

the difficulty to be encountered, or shutting their eyes to its probable

consequences. Cautious, wary, schooled in the subtle strategy of Indian

warfare, where self-preservation is by no means a secondary object, they

had little in common with the reckless enthusiasm of their French allies,

or the stolid indifference of the fighting machines of the British

regular army. When danger could no longer be avoided, they met it with

firmness and iron endurance, but with a very vivid appreciation of its

magnitude. Indeed, it must be admitted by all who are familiar with the

history of our fathers that the element of fear held an important place

among their characteristics. It exaggerated all the dangers of their

earthly pilgrimage, and peopled the future with shapes of evil. Their

fear of Satan invested him with some of the attributes of Omnipotence,

and almost reached the point of reverence. The slightest shock of an

earthquake filled all hearts with terror. Stout men trembled by their

hearths with dread of some paralytic old woman supposed to be a witch.

And when they believed themselves called upon to grapple with these

terrors and endure the afflictions of their allotment, they brought to

the trial a capability of suffering undiminished by the chloroform of

modern philosophy. They were heroic in endurance. Panics like the one

we have described might bow and sway them like reeds in the wind; but

they stood up like the oaks of their own forests beneath the thunder and

the hail of actual calamity.

It was certainly lucky for the good people of Essex County that no wicked

wag of a Tory undertook to immortalize in rhyme their ridiculous hegira,

as Judge Hopkinson did the famous Battle of the Kegs in Philadelphia.

Like the more recent Madawaska war in Maine, the great Chepatchet

demonstration in Rhode Island, and the "Sauk fuss" of Wisconsin, it

remains to this day "unsyllabled, unsung;" and the fast-fading memory of

age alone preserves the unwritten history of the great Ipswich fright.

POPE NIGHT.

"Lay up the fagots neat and trim;

Pile 'em up higher;

Set 'em afire!

The Pope roasts us, and we 'll roast him!"

Old Song.

The recent attempt of the Romish Church to reestablish its hierarchy in

Great Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems to

have revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport,

which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the "No Popery" mob, had

very generally fallen into disuse. On the 5th of the eleventh month of

this present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted up

with bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot"

of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605. Popes, bishops, and cardinals, in

straw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amid

the shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtless

been quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishop

of Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about and

burned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one.

In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legal

restrictions, each ecclesiastical tub balancing itself as it best may on

its own bottom, and where bishops Catholic and bishops Episcopal, bishops

Methodist and bishops Mormon, jostle each other in our thoroughfares, it

is not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter at

issue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water. It

is a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as it

cannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of the

spiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that a

hierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen and

tent-makers of the New Testament.

Pope Night--the anniversary of the discovery of the Papal incendiary Guy

Fawkes, booted and spurred, ready to touch fire to his powder-train under

the Parliament House--was celebrated by the early settlers of New

England, and doubtless afforded a good deal of relief to the younger

plants of grace in the Puritan vineyard. In those solemn old days, the

recurrence of the powder-plot anniversary, with its processions, hideous

images of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, its liberal potations of strong

waters, and its blazing bonfires reddening the wild November hills, must

have been looked forward to with no slight degree of pleasure. For one

night, at least, the cramped and smothered fun and mischief of the

younger generation were permitted to revel in the wild extravagance

of a Roman saturnalia or the Christmas holidays of a slave plantation.

Bigotry--frowning upon the May-pole, with its flower wreaths and sportive

revellers, and counting the steps of the dancers as so many steps towards

perdition--recognized in the grim farce of Guy Fawkes's anniversary

something of its own lineaments, smiled complacently upon the riotous

young actors, and opened its close purse to furnish tar-barrels to roast

the Pope, and strong water to moisten the throats of his noisy judges and

executioners.

Up to the time of the Revolution the powder plot was duly commemorated

throughout New England. At that period the celebration of it was

discountenanced, and in many places prohibited, on the ground that it was

insulting to our Catholic allies from France. In Coffin's History of

Newbury it is stated that, in 1774, the town authorities of Newburyport

ordered "that no effigies be carried about or exhibited only in the

daytime." The last public celebration in that town was in the following

year. Long before the close of the last century the exhibitions of Pope

Night had entirely ceased throughout the country, with, as far as we can

learn, a solitary exception. The stranger who chances to be travelling

on the road between Newburyport and Haverhill, on the night of the 5th of

November, may well fancy that an invasion is threatened from the sea, or

that an insurrection is going on inland; for from all the high hills

overlooking the river tall fires are seen blazing redly against the cold,

dark, autumnal sky, surrounded by groups of young men and boys busily

engaged in urging them with fresh fuel into intenser activity. To feed

these bonfires, everything combustible which could be begged or stolen

from the neighboring villages, farm-houses, and fences is put in

requisition. Old tar-tubs, purloined from the shipbuilders of the

river-side, and flour and lard barrels from the village-traders, are

stored away for days, and perhaps weeks, in the woods or in the rain-

gullies of the hills, in preparation for Pope Night. From the earliest

settlement of the towns of Amesbury and Salisbury, the night of the

powder plot has been thus celebrated, with unbroken regularity, down to

the present time. The event which it once commemorated is probably now

unknown to most of the juvenile actors. The symbol lives on from

generation to generation after the significance is lost; and we have seen

the children of our Catholic neighbors as busy as their Protestant

playmates in collecting, "by hook or by crook," the materials for Pope-

Night bonfires. We remember, on one occasion, walking out with a gifted

and learned Catholic friend to witness the fine effect of the

illumination on the hills, and his hearty appreciation of its picturesque

and wild beauty,--the busy groups in the strong relief of the fires, and

the play and corruscation of the changeful lights on the bare, brown

hills, naked trees, and autumn clouds.

In addition to the bonfires on the hills, there was formerly a procession

in the streets, bearing grotesque images of the Pope, his cardinals and

friars; and behind them Satan himself, a monster with huge ox-horns on

his head, and a long tail, brandishing his pitchfork and goading them

onward. The Pope was generally furnished with a movable head, which

could be turned round, thrown back, or made to bow, like that of a china-

ware mandarin. An aged inhabitant of the neighborhood has furnished us

with some fragments of the songs sung on such occasions, probably the

same which our British ancestors trolled forth around their bonfires two

centuries ago:--

"The fifth of November,

As you well remember,

Was gunpowder treason and plot;

And where is the reason

That gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot?"

"When James the First the sceptre swayed,

This hellish powder plot was laid;

They placed the powder down below,

All for Old England's overthrow.

Lucky the man, and happy the day,

That caught Guy Fawkes in the middle of his play!"

"Hark! our bell goes jink, jink, jink;

Pray, madam, pray, sir, give us something to drink;

Pray, madam, pray, sir, if you'll something give,

We'll burn the dog, and not let him live.

We'll burn the dog without his head,

And then you'll say the dog is dead."

"Look here! from Rome The Pope has come,

That fiery serpent dire;

Here's the Pope that we have got,

The old promoter of the plot;

We'll stick a pitchfork in his back,

And throw him in the fire!"

There is a slight savor of a Smithfield roasting about these lines, such

as regaled the senses of the Virgin Queen or Bloody Mary, which entirely

reconciles us to their disuse at the present time.

It should be the fervent prayer of all good men that the evil spirit of

religious hatred and intolerance, which on the one hand prompted the

gunpowder plot, and which on the other has ever since made it the

occasion of reproach and persecution of an entire sect of professing

Christians, may be no longer perpetuated. In the matter of exclusiveness

and intolerance, none of the older sects can safely reproach each other;

and it becomes all to hope and labor for the coming of that day when the

hymns of Cowper and the Confessions of Augustine, the humane philosophy

of Channing and the devout meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the simple

essays of Woolman and the glowing periods of Bossuet, shall be regarded

as the offspring of one spirit and one faith,--lights of a common altar,

and precious stones in the temple of the one universal Church.

THE BOY CAPTIVES. AN INCIDENT OF THE INDIAN WAR OF 1695.

The township of Haverhill, even as late as the close of the seventeenth

century, was a frontier settlement, occupying an advanced position in the

great wilderness, which, unbroken by the clearing of a white man,

extended from the Merrimac River to the French villages on the St.

Francois. A tract of twelve miles on the river and three or four

northwardly was occupied by scattered settlers, while in the centre of

the town a compact village had grown up. In the immediate vicinity there

were but few Indians, and these generally peaceful and inoffensive. On

the breaking out of the Narragansett war, the inhabitants had erected

fortifications and taken other measures for defence; but, with the

possible exception of one man who was found slain in the woods in 1676,

none of the inhabitants were molested; and it was not until about the

year 1689 that the safety of the settlement was seriously threatened.

Three persons were killed in that year. In 1690 six garrisons were

established in different parts of the town, with a small company of

soldiers attached to each. Two of these houses are still standing. They

were built of brick, two stories high, with a single outside door, so

small and narrow that but one person could enter at a time; the windows

few, and only about two and a half feet long by eighteen inches with

thick diamond glass secured with lead, and crossed inside with bars of

iron. The basement had but two rooms, and the chamber was entered by a

ladder instead of stairs; so that the inmates, if driven thither, could

cut off communication with the rooms below. Many private houses were

strengthened and fortified. We remember one familiar to our boyhood,--

a venerable old building of wood, with brick between the weather boards

and ceiling, with a massive balustrade over the door, constructed of oak

timber and plank, with holes through the latter for firing upon

assailants. The door opened upon a stone-paved hall, or entry, leading

into the huge single room of the basement, which was lighted by two small

windows, the ceiling black with the smoke of a century and a half; a huge

fireplace, calculated for eight-feet wood, occupying one entire side;

while, overhead, suspended from the timbers, or on shelves fastened to

them, were household stores, farming utensils, fishing-rods, guns,

bunches of herbs gathered perhaps a century ago, strings of dried apples

and pumpkins, links of mottled sausages, spareribs, and flitches of

bacon; the firelight of an evening dimly revealing the checked woollen

coverlet of the bed in one far-off corner, while in another "the pewter

plates on the dresser Caught and reflected the flame as shields of armies

the sunshine."

Tradition has preserved many incidents of life in the garrisons. In

times of unusual peril the settlers generally resorted at night to the

fortified houses, taking thither their flocks and herds and such

household valuables as were most likely to strike the fancy or minister

to the comfort or vanity of the heathen marauders. False alarms were

frequent. The smoke of a distant fire, the bark of a dog in the deep

woods, a stump or bush taking in the uncertain light of stars and moon

the appearance of a man, were sufficient to spread alarm through the

entire settlement, and to cause the armed men of the garrison to pass

whole nights in sleepless watching. It is said that at Haselton's

garrison-house the sentinel on duty saw, as he thought, an Indian inside

of the paling which surrounded the building, and apparently seeking to

gain an entrance. He promptly raised his musket and fired at the

intruder, alarming thereby the entire garrison. The women and children

left their beds, and the men seized their guns and commenced firing on

the suspicious object; but it seemed to bear a charmed life, and remained

unharmed. As the morning dawned, however, the mystery was solved by the

discovery of a black quilted petticoat hanging on the clothes-line,

completely riddled with balls.

As a matter of course, under circumstances of perpetual alarm and

frequent peril, the duty of cultivating their fields, and gathering their

harvests, and working at their mechanical avocations was dangerous and

difficult to the settlers. One instance will serve as an illustration.

At the garrison-house of Thomas Dustin, the husband of the far-famed Mary

Dustin, (who, while a captive of the Indians, and maddened by the murder

of her infant child, killed and scalped, with the assistance of a young

boy, the entire band of her captors, ten in number,) the business of

brick-making was carried on. The pits where the clay was found were only

a few rods from the house; yet no man ventured to bring the clay to the

yard within the enclosure without the attendance of a file of soldiers.

An anecdote relating to this garrison has been handed down to the present

tune. Among its inmates were two young cousins, Joseph and Mary

Whittaker; the latter a merry, handsome girl, relieving the tedium of

garrison duty with her light-hearted mirthfulness, and

"Making a sunshine in that shady place."

Joseph, in the intervals of his labors in the double capacity of brick-

maker and man-at-arms, was assiduous in his attentions to his fair

cousin, who was not inclined to encourage him. Growing desperate, he

threatened one evening to throw himself into the garrison well. His

threat only called forth the laughter of his mistress; and, bidding her

farewell, he proceeded to put it in execution. On reaching the well he

stumbled over a log; whereupon, animated by a happy idea, he dropped the

wood into the water instead of himself, and, hiding behind the curb,

awaited the result. Mary, who had been listening at the door, and who

had not believed her lover capable of so rash an act, heard the sudden

plunge of the wooden Joseph. She ran to the well, and, leaning over the

curb and peering down the dark opening, cried out, in tones of anguish

and remorse, "O Joseph, if you're in the land of the living, I 'll have

you!" "I'll take ye at your word," answered Joseph, springing up from

his hiding-place, and avenging himself for her coyness and coldness by a

hearty embrace.

Our own paternal ancestor, owing to religious scruples in the matter of

taking arms even for defence of life and property, refused to leave his

undefended house and enter the garrison. The Indians frequently came to

his house; and the family more than once in the night heard them

whispering under the windows, and saw them put their copper faces to the

glass to take a view of the apartments. Strange as it may seen, they

never offered any injury or insult to the inmates.

In 1695 the township was many times molested by Indians, and several

persons were killed and wounded. Early in the fall a small party made

their appearance in the northerly part of the town, where, finding two

boys at work in an open field, they managed to surprise and capture them,

and, without committing further violence, retreated through the woods to

their homes on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Isaac Bradley, aged

fifteen, was a small but active and vigorous boy; his companion in

captivity, Joseph Whittaker, was only eleven, yet quite as large in size,

and heavier in his movements. After a hard and painful journey they

arrived at the lake, and were placed in an Indian family, consisting of a

man and squaw and two or three children. Here they soon acquired a

sufficient knowledge of the Indian tongue to enable them to learn from

the conversation carried on in their presence that it was designed to

take them to Canada in the spring. This discovery was a painful one.

Canada, the land of Papist priests and bloody Indians, was the especial

terror of the New England settlers, and the anathema maranatha of Puritan

pulpits. Thither the Indians usually hurried their captives, where they

compelled them to work in their villages or sold them to the French

planters. Escape from thence through a deep wilderness, and across lakes

and mountains and almost impassable rivers, without food or guide, was

regarded as an impossibility. The poor boys, terrified by the prospect

of being carried still farther from their home and friends, began to

dream of escaping from their masters before they started for Canada. It

was now winter; it would have been little short of madness to have chosen

for flight that season of bitter cold and deep snows. Owing to exposure

and want of proper food and clothing, Isaac, the eldest of the boys, was

seized with a violent fever, from which he slowly recovered in the course

of the winter. His Indian mistress was as kind to him as her

circumstances permitted,--procuring medicinal herbs and roots for her

patient, and tenderly watching over him in the long winter nights.

Spring came at length; the snows melted; and the ice was broken up on the

lake. The Indians began to make preparations for journeying to Canada;

and Isaac, who had during his sickness devised a plan of escape, saw that

the time of putting it in execution had come. On the evening before he

was to make the attempt he for the first time informed his younger

companion of his design, and told him, if he intended to accompany him,

he must be awake at the time appointed. The boys lay down as usual in

the wigwam, in the midst of the family. Joseph soon fell asleep; but

Isaac, fully sensible of the danger and difficulty of the enterprise

before him, lay awake, watchful for his opportunity. About midnight he

rose, cautiously stepping over the sleeping forms of the family, and

securing, as he went, his Indian master's flint, steel, and tinder, and a

small quantity of dry moose-meat and cornbread. He then carefully

awakened his companion, who, starting up, forgetful of the cause of his

disturbance, asked aloud, "What do you want?" The savages began to stir;

and Isaac, trembling with fear of detection, lay down again and pretended

to be asleep. After waiting a while he again rose, satisfied, from the

heavy breathing of the Indians, that they were all sleeping; and fearing

to awaken Joseph a second time, lest he should again hazard all by his

thoughtlessness, he crept softly out of the wigwam. He had proceeded but

a few rods when he heard footsteps behind him; and, supposing himself

pursued, he hurried into the woods, casting a glance backward. What was

his joy to see his young companion running after him! They hastened on

in a southerly direction as nearly as they could determine, hoping to

reach their distant home. When daylight appeared they found a large

hollow log, into which they crept for concealment, wisely judging that

they would be hotly pursued by their Indian captors.

Their sagacity was by no means at fault. The Indians, missing their

prisoners in the morning, started off in pursuit with their dogs. As the

young boys lay in the log they could hear the whistle of the Indians and

the barking of dogs upon their track. It was a trying moment; and even

the stout heart of the elder boy sank within him as the dogs came up to

the log and set up a loud bark of discovery. But his presence of mind

saved him. He spoke in a low tone to the dogs, who, recognizing his

familiar voice, wagged their tails with delight and ceased barking. He

then threw to them the morsel of moose-meat he had taken from the wigwam.

While the dogs were thus diverted the Indians made their appearance. The

boys heard the light, stealthy sound of their moccasins on the leaves.

They passed close to the log; and the dogs, having devoured their moose-

meat, trotted after their masters. Through a crevice in the log the boys

looked after them and saw them disappear in the thick woods. They

remained in their covert until night, when they started again on their

long journey, taking a new route to avoid the Indians. At daybreak they

again concealed themselves, but travelled the next night and day without

resting. By this time they had consumed all the bread which they had

taken, and were fainting from hunger and weariness. Just at the close of

the third day they were providentially enabled to kill a pigeon and a

small tortoise, a part of which they ate raw, not daring to make a fire,

which might attract the watchful eyes of savages. On the sixth day they

struck upon an old Indian path, and, following it until night, came

suddenly upon a camp of the enemy. Deep in the heart of the forest,

under the shelter of a ridge of land heavily timbered, a great fire of

logs and brushwood was burning; and around it the Indians sat, eating

their moose-meat and smoking their pipes.

The poor fugitives, starving, weary, and chilled by the cold spring

blasts, gazed down upon the ample fire; and the savory meats which the

squaws were cooking by it, but felt no temptation to purchase warmth and

food by surrendering themselves to captivity. Death in the forest seemed

preferable. They turned and fled back upon their track, expecting every

moment to hear the yells of pursuers. The morning found them seated on

the bank of a small stream, their feet torn and bleeding, and their

bodies emaciated. The elder, as a last effort, made search for roots,

and fortunately discovered a few ground-nuts, (glicine apios) which

served to refresh in some degree himself and his still weaker companion.

As they stood together by the stream, hesitating and almost despairing,

it occurred to Isaac that the rivulet might lead to a larger stream of

water, and that to the sea and the white settlements near it; and he

resolved to follow it. They again began their painful march; the day

passed, and the night once more overtook them. When the eighth morning

dawned, the younger of the boys found himself unable to rise from his bed

of leaves. Isaac endeavored to encourage him, dug roots, and procured

water for him; but the poor lad was utterly exhausted. He had no longer

heart or hope. The elder boy laid him on leaves and dry grass at the

foot of a tree, and with a heavy heart bade him farewell. Alone he

slowly and painfully proceeded down the stream, now greatly increased in

size by tributary rivulets. On the top of a hill, he climbed with

difficulty into a tree, and saw in the distance what seemed to be a

clearing and a newly raised frame building. Hopeful and rejoicing, he

turned back to his young companion, told him what he had seen, and, after

chafing his limbs awhile, got him upon his feet. Sometimes supporting

him, and at others carrying him on his back, the heroic boy staggered

towards the clearing. On reaching it he found it deserted, and was

obliged to continue his journey. Towards night signs of civilization

began to appear,--the heavy, continuous roar of water was heard; and,

presently emerging from the forest, he saw a great river dashing in white

foam down precipitous rocks, and on its bank the gray walls of a huge

stone building, with flankers, palisades, and moat, over which the

British flag was flying. This was the famous Saco Fort, built by

Governor Phips two years before, just below the falls of the Saco River.

The soldiers of the garrison gave the poor fellows a kindly welcome.

Joseph, who was scarcely alive, lay for a long time sick in the fort; but

Isaac soon regained his strength, and set out for his home in Haverhill,

which he had the good fortune to arrive at in safety.

Amidst the stirring excitements of the present day, when every thrill of

the electric wire conveys a new subject for thought or action to a

generation as eager as the ancient Athenians for some new thing, simple

legends of the past like that which we have transcribed have undoubtedly

lost in a great degree their interest. The lore of the fireside is

becoming obsolete, and with the octogenarian few who still linger among

us will perish the unwritten history of border life in New England.

THE BLACK MEN IN THE REVOLUTION AND WAR OF 1812.

The return of the festival of our national independence has called our

attention to a matter which has been very carefully kept out of sight by

orators and toast-drinkers. We allude to the participation of colored

men in the great struggle for American freedom. It is not in accordance

with our taste or our principles to eulogize the shedders of blood even

in a cause of acknowledged justice; but when we see a whole nation doing

honor to the memories of one class of its defenders to the total neglect

of another class, who had the misfortune to be of darker complexion, we

cannot forego the satisfaction of inviting notice to certain historical

facts which for the last half century have been quietly elbowed aside,

as no more deserving of a place in patriotic recollection than the

descendants of the men to whom the facts in question relate have to a

place in a Fourth of July procession.

Of the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolution

no attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record. They

have had no historian. With here and there an exception, they have all

passed away; and only some faint tradition of their campaigns under

Washington and Greene and Lafayette, and of their cruisings under Decatur

and Barry, lingers among their, descendants. Yet enough is known to show

that the free colored men of the United States bore their full proportion

of the sacrifices and trials of the Revolutionary War.

The late Governor Eustis, of Massachusetts,--the pride and boast of the

democracy of the East, himself an active participant in the war, and

therefore a most competent witness,--Governor Morrill, of New Hampshire,

Judge Hemphill, of Pennsylvania, and other members of Congress, in the

debate on the question of admitting Missouri as a slave State into the

Union, bore emphatic testimony to the efficiency and heroism of the black

troops. Hon. Calvin Goddard, of Connecticut, states that in the little

circle of his residence he was instrumental in securing, under the act of

1818, the pensions of nineteen colored soldiers. "I cannot," he says,

"refrain from mentioning one aged black man, Primus Babcock, who proudly

presented to me an honorable discharge from service during the war, dated

at the close of it, wholly in the handwriting of George Washington; nor

can I forget the expression of his feelings when informed, after his

discharge had been sent to the War Department, that it could not be

returned. At his request it was written for, as he seemed inclined to

spurn the pension and reclaim the discharge." There is a touching

anecdote related of Baron Stenben on the occasion of the disbandment of

the American army. A black soldier, with his wounds unhealed, utterly

destitute, stood on the wharf just as a vessel bound for his distant home

was getting under way. The poor fellow gazed at the vessel with tears in

his eyes, and gave himself up to despair. The warm-hearted foreigner

witnessed his emotion, and, inquiring into the cause of it, took his last

dollar from his purse and gave it to him, with tears of sympathy

trickling down his cheeks. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the poor wounded

soldier hailed the sloop and was received on board. As it moved out from

the wharf, he cried back to his noble friend on shore, "God Almighty

bless you, Master Baron!"

"In Rhode Island," says Governor Eustis in his able speech against

slavery in Missouri, 12th of twelfth month, 1820, "the blacks formed an

entire regiment, and they discharged their duty with zeal and fidelity.

The gallant defence of Red Bank, in which the black regiment bore a part,

is among the proofs of their valor." In this contest it will be

recollected that four hundred men met and repulsed, after a terrible and

sanguinary struggle, fifteen hundred Hessian troops, headed by Count

Donop. The glory of the defence of Red Bank, which has been pronounced

one of the most heroic actions of the war, belongs in reality to black

men; yet who now hears them spoken of in connection with it? Among the

traits which distinguished the black regiment was devotion to their

officers. In the attack made upon the American lines near Croton River

on the 13th of the fifth month, 1781, Colonel Greene, the commander of

the regiment, was cut down and mortally wounded; but the sabres of the

enemy only reached him through the bodies of his faithful guard of

blacks, who hovered over him to protect him, every one of whom was

killed. The late Dr. Harris, of Dunbarton, New Hampshire, a

Revolutionary veteran, stated, in a speech at Francistown, New Hampshire,

some years ago, that on one occasion the regiment to which he was

attached was commanded to defend an important position, which the enemy

thrice assailed, and from which they were as often repulsed. "There

was," said the venerable speaker, "a regiment of blacks in the same

situation,--a regiment of negroes fighting for our liberty and

independence, not a white man among them but the officers,--in the same

dangerous and responsible position. Had they been unfaithful or given

way before the enemy, all would have been lost. Three times in

succession were they attacked with most desperate fury by well-

disciplined and veteran troops; and three times did they successfully

repel the assault, and thus preserve an army. They fought thus through

the war. They were brave and hardy troops."

In the debate in the New York Convention of 1821 for amending the

Constitution of the State, on the question of extending the right of

suffrage to the blacks, Dr. Clarke, the delegate from Delaware County,

and other members, made honorable mention of the services of the colored

troops in the Revolutionary army.

The late James Forten, of Philadelphia, well known as a colored man of

wealth, intelligence, and philanthropy, enlisted in the American navy

under Captain Decatur, of the Royal Louis, was taken prisoner during his

second cruise, and, with nineteen other colored men, confined on board

the horrible Jersey prison-ship; All the vessels in the American service

at that period were partly manned by blacks. The old citizens of

Philadelphia to this day remember the fact that, when the troops of the

North marched through the city, one or more colored companies were

attached to nearly all the regiments.

Governor Eustis, in the speech before quoted, states that the free

colored soldiers entered the ranks with the whites. The time of those

who were slaves was purchased of their masters, and they were induced to

enter the service in consequence of a law of Congress by which, on

condition of their serving in the ranks during the war, they were made

freemen. This hope of liberty inspired them with courage to oppose their

breasts to the Hessian bayonet at Red Bank, and enabled them to endure

with fortitude the cold and famine of Valley Forge. The anecdote of the

slave of General Sullivan, of New Hampshire, is well known. When his

master told him that they were on the point of starting for the army, to

fight for liberty, he shrewdly suggested that it would be a great

satisfaction to know that he was indeed going to fight for his liberty.

Struck with the reasonableness and justice of this suggestion, General

Sullivan at once gave him his freedom.

The late Tristam Burgess, of Rhode Island, in a speech in Congress, first

month, 1828, said "At the commencement of the Revolutionary War, Rhode

Island had a number of slaves. A regiment of them were enlisted into the

Continental service, and no braver men met the enemy in battle; but not

one of them was permitted to be a soldier until he had first been made a

freeman."

The celebrated Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, in his speech on the

Missouri question, and in defence of the slave representation of the

South, made the following admissions:--

"They (the colored people) were in numerous instances the pioneers, and

in all the laborers, of our armies. To their hands were owing the

greatest part of the fortifications raised for the protection of the

country. Fort Moultrie gave, at an early period of the inexperienced and

untried valor of our citizens, immortality to the American arms; and in

the Northern States numerous bodies of them were enrolled, and fought

side by side with the whites at the battles of the Revolution."

Let us now look forward thirty or forty years, to the last war with Great

Britain, and see whether the whites enjoyed a monopoly of patriotism at

that time.

Martindale, of New York, in Congress, 22d of first month, 1828, said:

"Slaves, or negroes who had been slaves, were enlisted as soldiers in the

war of the Revolution; and I myself saw a battalion of them, as fine,

martial-looking men as I ever saw, attached to the Northern army in the

last war, on its march from Plattsburg to Sackett's Harbor."

Hon. Charles Miner, of Pennsylvania, in Congress, second month, 7th,

1828, said: "The African race make excellent soldiers. Large numbers of

them were with Perry, and helped to gain the brilliant victory of Lake

Erie. A whole battalion of them were distinguished for their orderly

appearance."

Dr. Clarke, in the convention which revised the Constitution of New York

in 1821, speaking of the colored inhabitants of the State, said:--

"In your late war they contributed largely towards some of your most

splendid victories. On Lakes Erie and Champlain, where your fleets

triumphed over a foe superior in numbers and engines of death, they were

manned in a large proportion with men of color. And in this very house,

in the fall of 1814, a bill passed, receiving the approbation of all the

branches of your government, authorizing the governor to accept the

services of a corps of two thousand free people of color. Sir, these

were times which tried men's souls. In these times it was no sporting

matter to bear arms. These were times when a man who shouldered his

musket did not know but he bared his bosom to receive a death-wound from

the enemy ere he laid it aside; and in these times these people were

found as ready and as willing to volunteer in your service as any other.

They were not compelled to go; they were not drafted. No; your pride had

placed them beyond your compulsory power. But there was no necessity for

its exercise; they were volunteers,--yes, sir, volunteers to defend that

very country from the inroads and ravages of a ruthless and vindictive

foe which had treated them with insult, degradation, and slavery."

On the capture of Washington by the British forces, it was judged

expedient to fortify, without delay, the principal towns and cities

exposed to similar attacks. The Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia

waited upon three of the principal colored citizens, namely, James

Forten, Bishop Allen, and Absalom Jones, soliciting the aid of the people

of color in erecting suitable defences for the city. Accordingly,

twenty-five hundred colored then assembled in the State-House yard, and

from thence marched to Gray's Ferry, where they labored for two days

almost without intermission. Their labors were so faithful and efficient

that a vote of thanks was tendered them by the committee. A battalion of

colored troops was at the same time organized in the city under an

officer of the United States army; and they were on the point of marching

to the frontier when peace was proclaimed.

General Jackson's proclamations to the free colored inhabitants of

Louisiana are well known. In his first, inviting them to take up arms,

he said:--

"As sons of freedom, you are now called on to defend our most inestimable

blessings. As Americans, your country looks with confidence to her

adopted children for a valorous support. As fathers, husbands, and

brothers, you are summoned to rally round the standard of the eagle, to

defend all which is dear in existence."

The second proclamation is one of the highest compliments ever paid by a

military chief to his soldiers:--

"TO THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR.

"Soldiers! when on the banks of the Mobile I called you to take up arms,

inviting you to partake the perils and glory of your white fellow-

citizens, I expected much from you; for I was not ignorant that you

possessed qualities most formidable to an invading enemy. I knew with

what fortitude you could endure hunger, and thirst, and all the fatigues

of a campaign. I knew well how you loved your native country, and that

you, as well as ourselves, had to defend what man holds most dear,--his

parents, wife, children, and property. You have done more than I

expected. In addition to the previous qualities I before knew you to

possess, I found among you a noble enthusiasm, which leads to the

performance of great things.

"Soldiers! the President of the United States shall hear how praiseworthy

was your conduct in the hour of danger, and the Representatives of the

American people will give you the praise your exploits entitle you to.

Your general anticipates them in applauding your noble ardor."

It will thus be seen that whatever honor belongs to the "heroes of the

Revolution" and the volunteers in "the second war for independence" is to

be divided between the white and the colored man. We have dwelt upon

this subject at length, not because it accords with our principles or

feelings, for it is scarcely necessary for us to say that we are one of

those who hold that

"Peace hath her victories

No less renowned than war,"

and certainly far more desirable and useful; but because, in popular

estimation, the patriotism which dares and does on the battle-field takes

a higher place than the quiet exercise of the duties of peaceful

citizenship; and we are willing that colored soldiers, with their

descendants, should have the benefit, if possible, of a public sentiment

which has so extravagantly lauded their white companions in arms. If

pulpits must be desecrated by eulogies of the patriotism of bloodshed, we

see no reason why black defenders of their country in the war for liberty

should not receive honorable mention as well as white invaders of a

neighboring republic who have volunteered in a war for plunder and

slavery extension. For the latter class of "heroes" we have very little

respect. The patriotism of too many of them forcibly reminds us of Dr.

Johnson's definition of that much-abused term "Patriotism, sir! 'T is

the last refuge of a scoundrel."

"What right, I demand," said an American orator some years ago, "have the

children of Africa to a homestead in the white man's country?" The

answer will in part be found in the facts which we have presented. Their

right, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dread

arbitrament of battle. Their bones whiten every stricken field of the

Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil

built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine

and nakedness of Valley Forge and the pestilential horrors of the old

Jersey prisonship. Have they, then, no claim to an equal participation

in the blessings which have grown out of the national independence for

which they fought? Is it just, is it magnanimous, is it safe, even, to

starve the patriotism of such a people, to cast their hearts out of the

treasury of the Republic, and to convert them, by political

disfranchisement and social oppression, into enemies?

THE SCOTTISH REFORMERS.

"The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small;

Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He

all."

FRIEDRICH VON LOGAU.

The great impulse of the French Revolution was not confined by

geographical boundaries. Flashing hope into the dark places of the

earth, far down among the poor and long oppressed, or startling the

oppressor in his guarded chambers like that mountain of fire which fell

into the sea at the sound of the apocalyptic trumpet, it agitated the

world.

The arguments of Condorcet, the battle-words of Mirabeau, the fierce zeal

of St. Just, the iron energy of Danton, the caustic wit of Camille

Desmoulins, and the sweet eloquence of Vergniaud found echoes in all

lands, and nowhere more readily than in Great Britain, the ancient foe

and rival of France. The celebrated Dr. Price, of London, and the still

more distinguished Priestley, of Birmingham, spoke out boldly in defence

of the great principles of the Revolution. A London club of reformers,

reckoning among its members such men as Sir William Jones, Earl Grey,

Samuel Whitbread, and Sir James Mackintosh, was established for the

purpose of disseminating liberal appeals and arguments throughout the

United Kingdom.

In Scotland an auxiliary society was formed, under the name of Friends of

the People. Thomas Muir, young in years, yet an elder in the Scottish

kirk, a successful advocate at the bar, talented, affable, eloquent, and

distinguished for the purity of his life and his enthusiasm in the cause

of freedom, was its principal originator. In the twelfth month of 1792 a

convention of reformers was held at Edinburgh. The government became

alarmed, and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Muir. He escaped to

France; but soon after, venturing to return to his native land, was

recognized and imprisoned. He was tried upon the charge of lending books

of republican tendency, and reading an address from Theobald Wolfe Tone

and the United Irishmen before the society of which he was a member. He

defended himself in a long and eloquent address, which concluded in the

following manly strain:--

"What, then, has been my crime? Not the lending to a relation a copy of

Thomas Paine's works,--not the giving away to another a few numbers of an

innocent and constitutional publication; but my crime is, for having

dared to be, according to the measure of my feeble abilities, a strenuous

and an active advocate for an equal representation of the people in the

House of the people,--for having dared to accomplish a measure by legal

means which was to diminish the weight of their taxes and to put an end

to the profusion of their blood. Gentlemen, from my infancy to this

moment I have devoted myself to the cause of the people. It is a good

cause: it will ultimately prevail,--it will finally triumph."

He was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and was removed to

the Edinburgh jail, from thence to the hulks, and lastly to the

transport-ship, containing eighty-three convicts, which conveyed him to

Botany Bay.

The next victim was Palmer, a learned and highly accomplished Unitarian

minister in Dundee. He was greatly beloved and respected as a polished

gentleman and sincere friend of the people. He was charged with

circulating a republican tract, and was sentenced to seven years'

transportation.

But the Friends of the People were not quelled by this summary punishment

of two of their devoted leaders. In the tenth month, 1793, delegates

were called together from various towns in Scotland, as well as from

Birmingham, Sheffield, and other places in England. Gerrald and Margarot

were sent up by the London society. After a brief sitting, the

convention was dispersed by the public authorities. Its sessions were

opened and closed with prayer, and the speeches of its members manifested

the pious enthusiasm of the old Cameronians and Parliament-men of the

times of Cromwell. Many of the dissenting clergy were present. William

Skirving, the most determined of the band, had been educated for the

ministry, and was a sincerely religious man. Joseph Gerrald was a young

man of brilliant talents and exemplary character. When the sheriff

entered the hall to disperse the friends of liberty, Gerrald knelt in

prayer. His remarkable words were taken down by a reporter on the spot.

There is nothing in modern history to compare with this supplication,

unless it be that of Sir Henry Vane, a kindred martyr, at the foot of the

scaffold, just before his execution. It is the prayer of universal

humanity, which God will yet hear and answer.

"O thou Governor of the universe, we rejoice that, at all times and in

all circumstances, we have liberty to approach Thy throne, and that we

are assured that no sacrifice is more acceptable to Thee than that which

is made for the relief of the oppressed. In this moment of trial and

persecution we pray that Thou wouldst be our defender, our counsellor,

and our guide. Oh, be Thou a pillar of fire to us, as Thou wast to our

fathers of old, to enlighten and direct us; and to our enemies a pillar

of cloud, and darkness, and confusion.

"Thou art Thyself the great Patron of liberty. Thy service is perfect

freedom. Prosper, we beseech Thee, every endeavor which we make to

promote Thy cause; for we consider the cause of truth, or every cause

which tends to promote the happiness of Thy creatures, as Thy cause.

"O thou merciful Father of mankind, enable us, for Thy name's sake, to

endure persecution with fortitude; and may we believe that all trials and

tribulations of life which we endure shall work together for good to them

that love Thee; and grant that the greater the evil, and the longer it

may be continued, the greater good, in Thy holy and adorable providence,

may be produced therefrom. And this we beg, not for our own merits, but

through the merits of Him who is hereafter to judge the world in

righteousness and mercy."

He ceased, and the sheriff, who had been temporarily overawed by the

extraordinary scene, enforced the warrant, and the meeting was broken up.

The delegates descended to the street in silence,--Arthur's Seat and

Salisbury Crags glooming in the distance and night,--an immense and

agitated multitude waiting around, over which tossed the flaring

flambeaux of the sheriff's train. Gerrald, who was already under arrest,

as he descended, spoke aloud, "Behold the funeral torches of Liberty!"

Skirving and several others were immediately arrested. They were tried

in the first month, 1794, and sentenced, as Muir and Palmer had

previously been, to transportation. Their conduct throughout was worthy

of their great and holy cause. Gerrald's defence was that of freedom

rather than his own. Forgetting himself, he spoke out manfully and

earnestly for the poor, the oppressed, the overtaxed, and starving

millions of his countrymen. That some idea may be formed of this noble

plea for liberty, I give an extract from the concluding paragraphs:--

"True religion, like all free governments, appeals to the understanding

for its support, and not to the sword. All systems, whether civil or

moral, can only be durable in proportion as they are founded on truth and

calculated to promote the good of mankind. This will account to us why

governments suited to the great energies of man have always outlived the

perishable things which despotism has erected. Yes, this will account to

us why the stream of Time, which is continually washing away the

dissoluble fabrics of superstitions and impostures, passes without injury

by the adamant of Christianity.

"Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of

the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always

preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated

by the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented,

the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting

rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and

conciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be called

in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their

proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to

the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and

become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever may

become of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish;

but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every

quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest

and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil.

"Gentlemen, I am in your hands. About my life I feel not the slightest

anxiety: if it would promote the cause, I would cheerfully make the

sacrifice; for if I perish on an occasion like the present, out of my

ashes will arise a flame to consume the tyrants and oppressors of my

country."

Years have passed, and the generation which knew the persecuted reformers

has given place to another. And now, half a century after William

Skirving, as he rose to receive his sentence, declared to his judges,

"You may condemn us as felons, but your sentence shall yet be reversed by

the people," the names of these men are once more familiar to British

lips. The sentence has been reversed; the prophecy of Skirving has

become history. On the 21st of the eighth month, 1853, the corner-stone

of a monument to the memory of the Scottish martyrs--for which

subscriptions had been received from such men as Lord Holland, the Dukes

of Bedford and Norfolk; and the Earls of Essex and Leicester--was laid

with imposing ceremonies in the beautiful burial-place of Calton Hill,

Edinburgh, by the veteran reformer and tribune of the people, Joseph

Hume, M. P. After delivering an appropriate address, the aged radical

closed the impressive scene by reading the prayer of Joseph Gerrald. At

the banquet which afterwards took place, and which was presided over by

John Dunlop, Esq., addresses were made by the president and Dr. Ritchie,

and by William Skirving, of Kirkaldy, son of the martyr. The Complete

Suffrage Association of Edinburgh, to the number of five hundred, walked

in procession to Calton Hill, and in the open air proclaimed unmolested

the very principles for which the martyrs of the past century had

suffered.

The account of this tribute to the memory of departed worth cannot fail

to awaken in generous hearts emotions of gratitude towards Him who has

thus signally vindicated His truth, showing that the triumph of the

oppressor is but for a season, and that even in this world a lie cannot

live forever. Well and truly did George Fox say in his last days,

"The truth is above all."

Will it be said, however, that this tribute comes too late; that it

cannot solace those brave hearts which, slowly broken by the long agony

of colonial servitude, are now cold in strange graves? It is, indeed, a

striking illustration of the truth that he who would benefit his fellow-

man must "walk by faith," sowing his seed in the morning, and in the

evening withholding not his hand; knowing only this, that in God's good

time the harvest shall spring up and ripen, if not for himself, yet for

others, who, as they bind the full sheaves and gather in the heavy

clusters, may perchance remember him with gratitude and set up stones of

memorial on the fields of his toil and sacrifices. We may regret that in

this stage of the spirit's life the sincere and self-denying worker is

not always permitted to partake of the fruits of his toil or receive the

honors of a benefactor. We hear his good evil spoken of, and his noblest

sacrifices counted as naught; we see him not only assailed by the wicked,

but discountenanced and shunned by the timidly good, followed on his hot

and dusty pathway by the execrations of the hounding mob and the

contemptuous pity of the worldly wise and prudent; and when at last the

horizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the places

which have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to say

with the regal voluptuary of old, This also is vanity and a great evil;

"for what hath a man of all his labor and of the vexation of his heart

wherein he hath labored under the sun?" But is this the end? Has God's

universe no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts in

our nestling-place? Has life's infancy only been provided for, and

beyond this poor nursery-chamber of Time is there no playground for the

soul's youth, no broad fields for its manhood? Perchance, could we but

lift the curtains of the narrow pinfold wherein we dwell, we might see

that our poor friend and brother whose fate we have thus deplored has by

no means lost the reward of his labors, but that in new fields of duty he

is cheered even by the tardy recognition of the value of his services in

the old. The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward

and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same

waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad

by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers,

perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of

Time. Who shall say that the mournful and repentant love with which the

benefactors of our race are at length regarded may not be to them, in

their new condition of being, sweet and grateful as the perfume of long-

forgotten flowers, or that our harvest-hymns of rejoicing may not reach

the ears of those who in weakness and suffering scattered the seeds of

blessing?

The history of the Edinburgh reformers is no new one; it is that of all

who seek to benefit their age by rebuking its popular crimes and exposing

its cherished errors. The truths which they told were not believed, and

for that very reason were the more needed; for it is evermore the case

that the right word when first uttered is an unpopular and denied one.

Hence he who undertakes to tread the thorny pathway of reform--who,

smitten with the love of truth and justice, or indignant in view of wrong

and insolent oppression, is rashly inclined to throw himself at once into

that great conflict which the Persian seer not untruly represented as a

war between light and darkness--would do well to count the cost in the

outset. If he can live for Truth alone, and, cut off from the general

sympathy, regard her service as its "own exceeding great reward;" if he

can bear to be counted a fanatic and crazy visionary; if, in all good

nature, he is ready to receive from the very objects of his solicitude

abuse and obloquy in return for disinterested and self-sacrificing

efforts for their welfare; if, with his purest motives misunderstood and

his best actions perverted and distorted into crimes, he can still hold

on his way and patiently abide the hour when "the whirligig of Time shall

bring about its revenges;" if, on the whole, he is prepared to be looked

upon as a sort of moral outlaw or social heretic, under good society's

interdict of food and fire; and if he is well assured that he can,

through all this, preserve his cheerfulness and faith in man,--let him

gird up his loins and go forward in God's name. He is fitted for his

vocation; he has watched all night by his armor. Whatever his trial may

be, he is prepared; he may even be happily disappointed in respect to it;

flowers of unexpected refreshing may overhang the hedges of his strait

and narrow way; but it remains to be true that he who serves his

contemporaries in faithfulness and sincerity must expect no wages from

their gratitude; for, as has been well said, there is, after all, but one

way of doing the world good, and unhappily that way the world does not

like; for it consists in telling it the very thing which it does not wish

to hear.

Unhappily, in the case of the reformer, his most dangerous foes are those

of his own household. True, the world's garden has become a desert and

needs renovation; but is his own little nook weedless? Sin abounds

without; but is his own heart pure? While smiting down the giants and

dragons which beset the outward world, are there no evil guests sitting

by his own hearth-stone? Ambition, envy, self-righteousness, impatience,

dogmatism, and pride of opinion stand at his door-way ready to enter

whenever he leaves it unguarded. Then, too, there is no small danger of

failing to discriminate between a rational philanthropy, with its

adaptation of means to ends, and that spiritual knight-errantry which

undertakes the championship of every novel project of reform, scouring

the world in search of distressed schemes held in durance by common sense

and vagaries happily spellbound by ridicule. He must learn that,

although the most needful truth may be unpopular, it does not follow that

unpopularity is a proof of the truth of his doctrines or the expediency

of his measures. He must have the liberality to admit that it is barely

possible for the public on some points to be right and himself wrong, and

that the blessing invoked upon those who suffer for righteousness is not

available to such as court persecution and invite contempt; for folly has

its martyrs as well as wisdom; and he who has nothing better to show of

himself than the scars and bruises which the popular foot has left upon

him is not even sure of winning the honors of martyrdom as some

compensation for the loss of dignity and self-respect involved in the

exhibition of its pains. To the reformer, in an especial manner, comes

home the truth that whoso ruleth his own spirit is greater than he who

taketh a city. Patience, hope, charity, watchfulness unto prayer,--how

needful are all these to his success! Without them he is in danger of

ingloriously giving up his contest with error and prejudice at the first

repulse; or, with that spiteful philanthropy which we sometimes witness,

taking a sick world by the nose, like a spoiled child, and endeavoring to

force down its throat the long-rejected nostrums prepared for its relief.

What then? Shall we, in view of these things, call back young, generous

spirits just entering upon the perilous pathway? God forbid! Welcome,

thrice welcome, rather. Let them go forward, not unwarned of the dangers

nor unreminded of the pleasures which belong to the service of humanity.

Great is the consciousness of right. Sweet is the answer of a good

conscience. He who pays his whole-hearted homage to truth and duty, who

swears his lifelong fealty on their altars, and rises up a Nazarite

consecrated to their holy service, is not without his solace and

enjoyment when, to the eyes of others, he seems the most lonely and

miserable. He breathes an atmosphere which the multitude know not of;

"a serene heaven which they cannot discern rests over him, glorious in

its purity and stillness." Nor is he altogether without kindly human

sympathies. All generous and earnest hearts which are brought in contact

with his own beat evenly with it. All that is good, and truthful, and

lovely in man, whenever and wherever it truly recognizes him, must sooner

or later acknowledge his claim to love and reverence. His faith

overcomes all things. The future unrolls itself before him, with its

waving harvest-fields springing up from the seed he is scattering; and he

looks forward to the close of life with the calm confidence of one who

feels that he has not lived idle and useless, but with hopeful heart and

strong arm has labored with God and Nature for the best.

And not in vain. In the economy of God, no effort, however small, put

forth for the right cause, fails of its effect. No voice, however

feeble, lifted up for truth, ever dies amidst the confused noises of

time. Through discords of sin and sorrow, pain and wrong, it rises a

deathless melody, whose notes of wailing are hereafter to be changed to

those of triumph as they blend with the great harmony of a reconciled

universe. The language of a transatlantic reformer to his friends is

then as true as it is hopeful and cheering: "Triumph is certain. We have

espoused no losing cause. In the body we may not join our shout with the

victors; but in spirit we may even now. There is but an interval of time

between us and the success at which we aim. In all other respects the

links of the chain are complete. Identifying ourselves with immortal and

immutable principles, we share both their immortality and immutability.

The vow which unites us with truth makes futurity present with us. Our

being resolves itself into an everlasting now. It is not so correct to

say that we shall be victorious as that we are so. When we will in

unison with the supreme Mind, the characteristics of His will become, in

some sort, those of ours. What He has willed is virtually done. It may

take ages to unfold itself; but the germ of its whole history is wrapped

up in His determination. When we make His will ours, which we do when we

aim at truth, that upon which we are resolved is done, decided, born.

Life is in it. It is; and the future is but the development of its

being. Ours, therefore, is a perpetual triumph. Our deeds are, all of

them, component elements of success." (Miall's Essays; Nonconformist,

Vol. iv.)

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH.

From a letter on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the landing

of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, December 22, 1870.

No one can appreciate more highly than myself the noble qualities of the

men and women of the Mayflower. It is not of them that I, a descendant

of the "sect called Quakers," have reason to complain in the matter of

persecution. A generation which came after them, with less piety and

more bigotry, is especially responsible for the little unpleasantness

referred to; and the sufferers from it scarcely need any present

championship. They certainly did not wait altogether for the revenges of

posterity. If they lost their ears, it is satisfactory to remember that

they made those of their mutilators tingle with a rhetoric more sharp

than polite.

A worthy New England deacon once described a brother in the church as a

very good man Godward, but rather hard man-ward. It cannot be denied

that some very satisfactory steps have been taken in the latter

direction, at least, since the days of the Pilgrims. Our age is tolerant

of creed and dogma, broader in its sympathies, more keenly sensitive to

temporal need, and, practically recognizing the brotherhood of the race,

wherever a cry of suffering is heard its response is quick and generous.

It has abolished slavery, and is lifting woman from world-old degradation

to equality with man before the law. Our criminal codes no longer embody

the maxim of barbarism, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," but

have regard not only for the safety of the community, but to the reform

and well-being of the criminal. All the more, however, for this amiable

tenderness do we need the counterpoise of a strong sense of justice.

With our sympathy for the wrong-doer we need the old Puritan and Quaker

hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a

righteous abhorrence of sin. All the more for the sweet humanities and

Christian liberalism which, in drawing men nearer to each other, are

increasing the sum of social influences for good or evil, we need the

bracing atmosphere, healthful, if austere, of the old moralities.

Individual and social duties are quite as imperative now as when they

were minutely specified in statute-books and enforced by penalties no

longer admissible. It is well that stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-

stool are now only matters of tradition; but the honest reprobation of

vice and crime which they symbolized should by no means perish with them.

The true life of a nation is in its personal morality, and no excellence

of constitution and laws can avail much if the people lack purity and

integrity. Culture, art, refinement, care for our own comfort and that

of others, are all well, but truth, honor, reverence, and fidelity to

duty are indispensable.

The Pilgrims were right in affirming the paramount authority of the law

of God. If they erred in seeking that authoritative law, and passed over

the Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if they

hesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemed

unwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings, let us

not forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they dared

to hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them to

dwell upon God's vengeance rather than his compassion; and whose dread of

evil was so great that, in shutting their hearts against it, they

sometimes shut out the good. It is well for us if we have learned to

listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes; but there are crises in

all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" or the

Decalogue which the founders wrote on the gate-posts of their

commonwealth.

Let us then be thankful for the assurances which the last few years have

afforded us that:

"The Pilgrim spirit is not dead,

But walks in noon's broad light."

We have seen it in the faith and trust which no circumstances could

shake, in heroic self-sacrifice, in entire consecration to duty. The

fathers have lived in their sons. Have we not all known the Winthrops

and Brewsters, the Saltonstalls and Sewalls, of old times, in

gubernatorial chairs, in legislative halls, around winter camp-fires, in

the slow martyrdoms of prison and hospital? The great struggle through

which we have passed has taught us how much we owe to the men and women

of the Plymouth Colony,--the noblest ancestry that ever a people looked

back to with love and reverence. Honor, then, to the Pilgrims! Let their

memory be green forever!

GOVERNOR ENDICOTT.

I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the Essex

Institute to its commemorative festival on the 18th. I especially regret

it, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such,

regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under the

administration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwise

noble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortune

it was to live in an age which regarded religious toleration as a crime.

He was the victim of the merciless logic of his creed. He honestly

thought that every convert to Quakerism became by virtue of that

conversion a child of perdition; and, as the head of the Commonwealth,

responsible for the spiritual as well as temporal welfare of its

inhabitants, he felt it his duty to whip, banish, and hang heretics to

save his people from perilous heresy.

The extravagance of some of the early Quakers has been grossly

exaggerated. Their conduct will compare in this respect favorably with

that of the first Anabaptists and Independents; but it must be admitted

that many of them manifested a good deal of that wild enthusiasm which

has always been the result of persecution and the denial of the rights of

conscience and worship. Their pertinacious defiance of laws enacted

against them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates,

must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and high

tempered as John Endicott. He had that free-tongued neighbor of his,

Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, but

it may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as much

under Wharton's biting sarcasm and "free speech" as the latter's back did

from the magisterial whip.

Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; and

their descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error which

the Puritan governor shared with the generation in which he lived.

WEST OSSIPEE, N. H., 14th 9th Month, 1878.

JOHN WINTHROP.

On the anniversary of his landing at Salem.

I see by the call of the Essex Institute that some probability is

suggested that I may furnish a poem for the occasion of its meeting at

The Willows on the 22d. I would be glad to make the implied probability

a fact, but I find it difficult to put my thoughts into metrical form,

and there will be little need of it, as I understand a lady of Essex

County, who adds to her modern culture and rare poetical gifts the best

spirit of her Puritan ancestry, has lent the interest of her verse to the

occasion.

It was a happy thought of the Institute to select for its first meeting

of the season the day and the place of the landing of the great and good

governor, and permit me to say, as thy father's old friend, that its

choice for orator, of the son of him whose genius, statesmanship, and

eloquence honored the place of his birth, has been equally happy. As I

look over the list of the excellent worthies of the first emigrations, I

find no one who, in all respects, occupies a nobler place in the early

colonial history of Massachusetts than John Winthrop. Like Vane and

Milton, he was a gentleman as well as a Puritan, a cultured and

enlightened statesman as well as a God-fearing Christian. It was not

under his long and wise chief magistracy that religious bigotry and

intolerance hung and tortured their victims, and the terrible delusion of

witchcraft darkened the sun at noonday over Essex. If he had not quite

reached the point where, to use the words of Sir Thomas More, he could

"hear heresies talked and yet let the heretics alone," he was in charity

and forbearance far in advance of his generation.

I am sorry that I must miss an occasion of so much interest. I hope you

will not lack the presence of the distinguished citizen who inherits the

best qualities of his honored ancestor, and who, as a statesman, scholar,

and patriot, has added new lustre to the name of Winthrop.