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VIII.

THE SECOND GENERATION OF ENGLISHMEN IN

WH

AMERICA.

HEN a modern American makes a pilgrimage, as I have done, to the English village church at whose altars his ancestors once ministered, he brings away a feeling of renewed wonder at the depth of conviction which led the Puritan clergy to forsake their early homes. The exquisitely peaceful features of the English rural landscape-the old Norman church, half ruined, and in this particular case restored by aid of the American descendants of that high-minded emigrant; the old burialground that surrounds it, a haunt of such peace as to make death seem doubly restful; the ancestral oaks; the rooks that soar above them; the flocks of sheep drifting noiselessly among the ancient gravestones-all speak of such tranquillity as the eager American must cross the Atlantic to obtain. No Englishman feels these things as the American feels them; the antiquity, as Hawthorne says, is our novelty. But beyond all the charm of the associations this thought always recurs—what love of their convictions, what devotion to their own faith, must have been needed to drive the educated Puritan clergymen from such delicious retreats to encounter the ocean, the forest, and the Indians!

Yet there was in the early emigration to every American colony quite another admixture than that of learning and refinement; a sturdy yeoman element, led by the desire to better

its condition and create a new religious world around it; and an adventurous element, wishing for new excitements. The popular opinion of that period did not leave these considerations out of sight, as may be seen by this London street ballad of 1640, describing the emigration:

"Our company we feare not, there goes my Cosen Hanna,
And Ruben doe perswade to goe his sister faire Susanna,
Wth Abigall and Lidia, and Ruth noe doubt comes after,
And Sara kinde will not stay behinde my Cosen Constance dafter-
Then for the truth's sake goe.

"Nay Tom Tyler is p'pared, and ye Smith as black as a cole,
And Ralph Cobbler too wth us will goe for he regards his soale,
And the weaver honest Lyman, wth Prudence Jacobs daughter,
And Agatha and Barrbarra professeth to come after-

Then for the truth's sake goe."

There were also traces, in the emigration, of that love of wandering, of athletic sports and woodcraft, that still sends young men of English race to the far corners of the earth. In the Virginia colonization this element was large, but it also entered into the composition of the Northern colonies. The sister of Governor Winthrop wrote from England, in 1637, of her son, afterwards Sir George Downing, that the boy was anxious to go to New England; and she spoke of the hazard that he was in "by reson of both his father's and his owne strange inclination to the plantation sports." Upham accordingly describes this same youth in Harvard College, where he graduated in 1642, as shooting birds in the wild woods of Salem, and setting duck-decoys in the ponds. Life in the earlier. days of the emigration was essentially a border life, a forest life, a frontier life-differing from such life in Australia or Colorado mainly in one wild dream which certainly added to its romance the dream that Satan still ruled the forest, and that the Indians were his agents.

Whatever else may be said of the Puritan emigration, it

represented socially and intellectually much of what was best in the mother country. Men whose life in England would have been that of the higher class of gentry might have been seen in New England taking with their own hands from the barrel their last measure of corn, and perhaps interrupted by the sight of a vessel arriving in the harbor with supplies. These men, who ploughed their own fields and shot their own venison, were men who had paced the halls of Emanuel College at Cambridge, who quoted Seneca in their journals of travel, and who brought with them books of classic literature among their works of theology. The library bequeathed by the Rev. John Harvard to the infant college at Cambridge included Homer, Pliny, Sallust, Terence, Juvenal, and Horace. The library bought by the commissioners from the Rev. Mr. Welde, for the Rev. Mr. Eliot, had in it Plutarch's Morals and the plays of Aristophanes. In its early poverty the colony voted £400 to found Harvard College, and that institution had for its second president a man so learned, after the fashion of those days, that he had the Hebrew Bible read to the students in the morning, and the Greek Testament in the afternoon, commenting on both extemporaneously in Latin. The curriculum of the institution was undoubtedly devised rather with a view to making learned theologians than elegant men of letters-thus much may be conceded to Mr. Matthew Arnold-but this was quite as much the case, as Mr. Mullinger has shown, in the English Cambridge of the seventeenth century.

The year 1650 may be roughly taken as closing the first generation of the American colonists. Virginia had then been settled forty-three years, New York thirty-six, Plymouth thirty, Massachusetts Bay twenty-two, Maryland nineteen, Connecticut seventeen, Rhode Island fourteen, New Haven twelve, and Delaware twelve. A variety of industries had already been introduced, especially in the New England colonies. Boat-building had there begun, according to Colonel C. D. Wright, in 1624;

brick-making, tanning, and windmills were introduced in 1629; shoemaking and saw-mills in 1635; cloth mills in 1638; printing the year after; and iron foundries in 1644. In Virginia the colony had come near to extinction in 1624, and had revived under wholly new leadership. In New England, Brewster, Winthrop, Higginson, Skelton, Shepard, and Hooker had all died; Bradford, Endicott, Standish, Winslow, Eliot, and Roger Williams were still living, but past their prime. Church and State were already beginning to be possessed by a younger race, who had either been born in America or been brought as young children to its shores. In this coming race, also, the traditions of learning prevailed; the reading of Cotton Mather, for instance, was as marvellous as his powers of memory. When he entered Harvard College, at eleven, he had read Cicero, Terence, Ovid, Virgil, and the Greek Testament; wrote Latin with ease; was reading Homer, and had begun the Hebrew grammar. But the influences around these men were stern and even gloomy, though tempered by scholarship, by the sweet charities of home, and by some semblance of relaxation. We can hardly say that there was nothing but sternness when we find the Rev. Peter Thacher at Barnstable, Massachusetts-a man of high standing in the churches-mitigating the care of souls, in 1679, by the erection of a private nine-pin alley on his own premises. Still there was for a time a distinct deepening of shadow around the lives of the Puritans, whether in the Northern or Southern colonies, after they were left wholly to themselves upon the soil of the New World. The persecutions and the delusions belong generally to this later epoch. In the earlier colonial period there would have been no time for them, and hardly any inclination. In the later or provincial period. society was undergoing a change, and wealth and aristocratic ways of living were being introduced. But it was in the intermediate time that religious rigor had its height.

Modern men habitually exaggerate the difference between

themselves and the Puritans. The points of difference are so great and so picturesque, we forget that the points of resemblance, after all, outweigh them. We seem more remote from

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them than is really the case, because we dwell too much on secondary matters- a garment, a phrase, a form of service. Theologian and historian are alike overcome by this; as soon as they touch the Puritans all is sombre, there is no sunshine,

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