HISTORICAL PAPERS

 BY

 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

CONTENTS:

HISTORICAL PAPERS. DANIEL O'CONNELL ENGLAND UNDER JAMES II. THE BORDER WAR OF 1708 THE GREAT IPSWICH FRIGHT THE BOY CAPTIVES THE BLACK MEN IN THE REVOLUTION AND WAR OF 1812 THE SCOTTISH REFORMERS THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH GOVERNOR ENDICOTT JOHN WINTHROP

 HISTORICAL PAPERS

DANIEL O'CONNELL. 

 In February, 1839, Henry Clay delivered a speech in the United States Senate, which was intended to smooth away the difficulties which his moderate opposition to the encroachments of slavery had erected in his path to the presidency. His calumniation of O'Connell called out the following summary of the career of the great Irish patriot. It was published originally in the Pennsylvania Freeman of Philadelphia, April 25, 1839. 

Perhaps the most unlucky portion of the unlucky speech of Henry Clay onthe slavery question is that in which an attempt is made to hold up toscorn and contempt the great Liberator of Ireland. We say an attempt, for who will say it has succeeded? Who feels contempt for O'Connell?Surely not the slaveholder? From Henry Clay, surrounded by his slave-gang at Ashland, to the most miserable and squalid slave-driver and smallbreeder of human cattle in Virginia and Maryland who can spell the nameof O'Connell in his newspaper, these republican brokers in blood fear andhate the eloquent Irishman. But their contempt, forsooth! Talk of thesheep-stealer's contempt for the officer of justice who nails his ears tothe pillory, or sets the branding iron on his forehead!

After denouncing the abolitionists for gratuitously republishing theadvertisements for runaway slaves, the Kentucky orator says:--

"And like a notorious agitator upon another theatre, they would hunt downand proscribe from the pale of civilized society the inhabitants of thatentire section. Allow me, Mr. President, to say that whilst I recognizein the justly wounded feelings of the Minister of the United States atthe Court of St. James much to excuse the notice which he was provoked totake of that agitator, in my humble opinion he would better haveconsulted the dignity of his station and of his country in treating himwith contemptuous silence. He would exclude us from European society, hewho himself, can only obtain a contraband admission, and is received withscornful repugnance into it! If he be no more desirous of our societythan we are of his, he may rest assured that a state of perpetual non-intercourse will exist between us. Yes, sir, I think the AmericanMinister would best have pursued the dictates of true dignity byregarding the language of the member of the British House of Commons asthe malignant ravings of the plunderer of his own country, and thelibeller of a foreign and kindred people. "

The recoil of this attack "followed hard upon" the tones ofcongratulation and triumph of partisan editors at the consummate skilland dexterity with which their candidate for the presidency had absolvedhimself from the suspicion of abolitionism, and by a master-stroke ofpolicy secured the confidence of the slaveholding section of theUnion. But the late Whig defeat in New York has put an end to thesepremature rejoicings. "The speech of Mr. Clay in reference to the Irishagitator has been made use of against us with no small success, " say theNew York papers. "They failed, " says the Daily Evening Star, "toconvince the Irish voters that Daniel O'Connell was the 'plunderer of hiscountry, ' or that there was an excuse for thus denouncing him. "

The defeat of the Whigs of New York and the cause of it have excited nosmall degree of alarm among the adherents of the Kentucky orator. Inthis city, the delicate _Philadelphia Gazette_ comes magnanimously to theaid of Henry Clay, --

 "A tom-tit twittering on an eagle's back. "

The learned editor gives it as his opinion that Daniel O'Connell is a"political beggar, " a "disorganizing apostate;" talks in its pretty wayof the man's "impudence" and "falsehoods" and "cowardice, " etc. ; andfinally, with a modesty and gravity which we cannot but admire, assuresus that "his weakness of mind is almost beyond calculation!"

We have heard it rumored during the past week, among some of the self-constituted organs of the Clay party in this city, that at a late meetingin Chestnut Street a committee was appointed to collect, collate, andpublish the correspondence between Andrew Stevenson and O'Connell, and somuch of the latter's speeches and writings as relate to American slavery, for the purpose of convincing the countrymen of O'Connell of the justice, propriety, and, in view of the aggravated circumstances of the case, moderation and forbearance of Henry Clay when speaking of a man who hashad the impudence to intermeddle with the "patriarchal institutions" ofour country, and with the "domestic relations" of Kentucky and Virginiaslave-traders. 

We wait impatiently for the fruits of the labors of this sagaciouscommittee. We should like to see those eloquent and thrilling appeals tothe sense of shame and justice and honor of America republished. Weshould like to see if any Irishman, not wholly recreant to the interestsand welfare of the Green Island of his birth, will in consequence of thispublication give his vote to the slanderer of Ireland's best and noblestchampion. 

But who is Daniel O'Connell? "A demagogue--a ruffian agitator!" say theTory journals of Great Britain, quaking meantime with awe andapprehension before the tremendous moral and political power which he iswielding, --a power at this instant mightier than that of any potentate ofEurope. "A blackguard"--a fellow who "obtains contraband admission intoEuropean society"--a "malignant libeller"--a "plunderer of his country"--a man whose "wind should be stopped, " say the American slaveholders, andtheir apologists, Clay, Stevenson, Hamilton, and the PhiladelphiaGazette, and the Democratic Whig Association. 

But who is Daniel O'Connell? Ireland now does justice to him, the worldwill do so hereafter. No individual of the present age has done more forhuman liberty. His labors to effect the peaceable deliverance of his ownoppressed countrymen, and to open to the nations of Europe a new andpurer and holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and unmoistenedby tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of Britishcolonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age. They will beremembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders ofTory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad, detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shallhave perished forever, --when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels andWellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the enemies ofslave emancipation in the United States, shall be numbered with those whoin all ages, to use the words of the eloquent Lamartine, have "sinnedagainst the Holy Ghost in opposing the improvement of things, --in anegotistical and stupid attempt to draw back the moral and social worldwhich God and nature are urging forward. "

The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciatedin this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in theplenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and thatwisdom will perish with us, " that all patriotism and liberality offeeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed theuntitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through thedevelopment of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the causeof liberty and the welfare of man. 

The revolution which O'Connell has already partially effected in hisnative land, and which, from the evident signs of cooperation in Englandand Scotland, seems not far from its entire accomplishment, will form anew era in the history of the civilized world. Heretofore the patriothas relied more upon physical than moral means for the regeneration ofhis country and its redemption from oppression. His revolutions, howeverpure in principle, have ended in practical crime. The great truth wasyet to be learned that brute force is incompatible with a pure love offreedom, inasmuch as it is in itself an odious species of tyranny--therelic of an age of slavery and barbarism--the common argument ofdespotism--a game

 "which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at. "

But the revolution in which O'Connell is engaged, although directedagainst the oppression of centuries, relies with just confidence upon theunited moral energies of the people: a moral victory of reason overprejudice, of justice over oppression; the triumph of intellectual energywhere the brute appeal to arms had miserably failed; the vindication ofman's eternal rights, not by the sword fleshed in human hearts, but byweapons tempered in the armory of Heaven with truth and mercy and love. 

Nor is it a visionary idea, or the untried theory of an enthusiast, thistriumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform ofpolitical abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down ofthe strongholds of arbitrary power. The emancipation of the Catholic ofGreat Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way forthe bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832. The CatholicAssociation was the germ of those political unions which compelled, bytheir mighty yet peaceful influence, the King of England to yieldsubmissively to the supremacy of the people. 

 [The celebrated Mr. Attwood has been called the "father of political unions. " In a speech delivered by his brother, C. Attwood, Esq. , at the Sunderland Reform Meeting, September 10, 1832, I find the following admission: "Gentlemen, the first political union was the Roman Catholic Association of Ireland, and the true founder and father of political unions is Daniel O'Connell. "]

Both of these remarkable events, these revolutions shaking nations totheir centre, yet polluted with no blood and sullied by no crime, wereeffected by the salutary agitations of the public mind, first set inmotion by the masterspirit of O'Connell, and spreading from around him toevery portion of the British empire like the undulations from thedisturbed centre of a lake. 

The Catholic question has been but imperfectly understood in thiscountry. Many have allowed their just disapprobation of the Catholicreligion to degenerate into a most unwarrantable prejudice against itsconscientious followers. The cruel persecutions of the dissenters fromthe Romish Church, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, the horrors ofthe Inquisition, the crusades against the Albigenses and the simpledwellers of the Vaudois valleys, have been regarded as atrocitiespeculiar to the believers in papal infallibility, and the necessaryconsequences of their doctrines; and hence they have looked upon theconstitutional agitation of the Irish Catholics for relief from grieveousdisabilities and unjust distinctions as a struggle merely for supremacyor power. 

Strange, that the truth to which all history so strongly testifies shouldthus be overlooked, --the undeniable truth that religious bigotry andintolerance have been confined to no single sect; that the persecuted ofone century have been the persecutors of another. In our own country, it would be well for us to remember that at the very time when in NewEngland the Catholic, the Quaker, and the Baptist were banished on painof death, and where some even suffered that dreadful penalty, in CatholicMaryland, under the Catholic Lord Baltimore, perfect liberty ofconscience was established, and Papist and Protestant went quietlythrough the same streets to their respective altars. 

At the commencement of O'Connell's labors for emancipation he found thepeople of Ireland divided into three great classes, --the Protestant orChurch party, the Dissenters, and the Catholics: the Church partyconstituting about one tenth of the population, yet holding in possessionthe government and a great proportion of the landed property of Ireland, controlling church and state and law and revenue, the army, navy, magistracy, and corporations, the entire patronage of the country, holding their property and power by the favor of England, andconsequently wholly devoted to her interest; the Dissenters, probablytwice as numerous as the Church party, mostly engaged in trade andmanufactures, --sustained by their own talents and industry, Irish infeeling, partaking in no small degree of the oppression of their Catholicbrethren, and among the first to resist that oppression in 1782; theCatholics constituting at least two thirds of the whole population, andalmost the entire peasantry of the country, forming a large proportionof the mercantile interest, yet nearly excluded from the possession oflanded property by the tyrannous operation of the penal laws. Justly hasa celebrated Irish patriot (Theobald Wolfe Tone) spoken of these laws as"an execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and malice of demonsto plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics of Ireland. There wasno disgrace, no injustice, no disqualification, moral, political, orreligious, civil or military, which it has not heaped upon them. "

The following facts relative to the disabilities under which theCatholics of the United Kingdom labored previous to the emancipation of1829 will serve to show in some measure the oppressive operation of thoselaws which placed the foot of one tenth of the population of Ireland uponthe necks of the remainder. 

A Catholic peer could not sit in the House of Peers, nor a Catholiccommoner in the House of Commons. A Catholic could not be LordChancellor, or Keeper, or Commissioner of the Great Seal; Master orKeeper of the Rolls; Justice of the King's Bench or of the Common Pleas;Baron of the Exchequer; Attorney or Solicitor General; King's Sergeant atLaw; Member of the King's Council; Master in Chancery, nor Chairman ofSessions for the County of Dublin. He could not be the Recorder of acity or town; an advocate in the spiritual courts; Sheriff of a county, city, or town; Sub-Sheriff; Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, or othergovernor of Ireland; Lord High Treasurer; Governor of a county; PrivyCouncillor; Postmaster General; Chancellor of the Exchequer or Secretaryof State; Vice Treasurer, Cashier of the Exchequer; Keeper of the PrivySeal or Auditor General; Provost or Fellow of Dublin University; nor LordMayor or Alderman of a corporate city or town. He could not be a memberof a parish vestry, nor bequeath any sum of money or any lands for themaintenance of a clergyman, or for the support of a chapel or a school;and in corporate towns he was excluded from the grand juries. 

O'Connell commenced his labors for emancipation with the strongconviction that nothing short of the united exertions of the Irish peoplecould overthrow the power of the existing government, and that a union ofaction could only be obtained by the establishment of something likeequality between the different religious parties. Discarding all otherthan peaceful means for the accomplishment of his purpose, he placedhimself and his followers beyond the cognizance of unjust and oppressivelaws. Wherever he poured the oil of his eloquence upon the maddenedspirits of his wronged and insulted countrymen, the mercenary soldieryfound no longer an excuse for violence; and calm, firm, and united, theCatholic Association remained secure in the moral strength of its pureand peaceful purpose, amid the bayonets of a Tory administration. Hisinfluence was felt in all parts of the island. Wherever an unlawfulassociation existed, his great legal knowledge enabled him at once todetect its character, and, by urging its dissolution, to snatch itsdeluded members from the ready fangs of their enemies. In his presencethe Catholic and the Protestant shook hands together, and the wild Irishclansman forgot his feuds. He taught the party in power, and whotrembled at the dangers around them, that security and peace could onlybe obtained by justice and kindness. He entreated his oppressed Catholicbrethren to lay aside their weapons, and with pure hearts and naked handsto stand firmly together in the calm but determined energy of men, toohumane for deeds of violence, yet too mighty for the patient endurance ofwrong. 

The spirit of the olden time was awakened, of the day when Floodthundered and Curran lightened; the light which shone for a moment in thedarkness of Ireland's century of wrong burned upwards clearly andsteadily from all its ancient altars. Shoulder to shoulder gatheredaround him the patriot spirits of his nation, --men unbribed by the goldenspoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyerand Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator, wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunionof Catholic and Protestant, --the sash of blended orange and green, soiledand defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins, and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and thedroppings of the wild woods of Clare. He united in one mighty andresistless mass the broken and discordant factions, whose desultorystruggles against tyranny had hitherto only added strength to itsfetters, and infused into that mass his own lofty principles of action, until the solemn tones of expostulation and entreaty, bursting at oncefrom the full heart of Ireland, were caught up by England and echoed backfrom Scotland, and the language of justice and humanity was wrung fromthe reluctant lips of the cold and remorseless oppressor of his nativeland, at once its disgrace and glory, --the conqueror of Napoleon; and, inthe words of his own Curran, the chains of the Catholic fell from aroundhim, and he stood forth redeemed and disenthralled by the irresistiblegenius of Universal Emancipation. 

On the passage of the bill for Catholic emancipation, O'Connell took hisseat in the British Parliament. The eyes of millions were upon him. Ireland--betrayed so often by those in whom she had placed herconfidence; brooding in sorrowful remembrance over the noble names andbrilliant reputations sullied by treachery and corruption, the long anddark catalogue of her recreant sons, who, allured by British gold andBritish patronage, had sacrificed on the altar of their ambition Irishpride and Irish independence, and lifted their parricidal arms againsttheir sorrowing mother, "crownless and voiceless in her woe"--now hungwith breathless eagerness over the ordeal to which her last greatchampion was subjected. 

The crisis in O'Connell's destiny had come. 

The glitter of the golden bribe was in his eye; the sound of titledmagnificence was in his ear; the choice was before him to sit high amongthe honorable, the titled, and the powerful, or to take his humble seatin the hall of St. Stephen's as the Irish demagogue, the agitator, theKerry representative. He did not hesitate in his choice. On the firstoccasion that offered he told the story of Ireland's wrongs, and demandedjustice in the name of his suffering constituents. He had put his handto the plough of reform, and he could not relinquish his hold, for hisheart was with it. 

Determined to give the Whig administration no excuse for neglecting theredress of Irish grievances, he entered heart and soul into the greatmeasure of English reform, and his zeal, tact, and eloquence contributednot a little to its success. Yet even his friends speak of his firstefforts in the House of Commons as failures. The Irish accent; the harshavowal of purposes smacking of rebellion; the eccentricities and floweryluxuriance of an eloquence nursed in the fervid atmosphere of Irelandsuddenly transplanted to the cold and commonplace one of St. Stephen's;the great and illiberal prejudices against him scarcely abated from whatthey were when, as the member from Clare, he was mobbed on his way toLondon, for a time opposed a barrier to the influence of his talents andpatriotism. But he triumphed at last: the mob-orator of Clare and Kerry, the declaimer in the Dublin Rooms of the Political and Trades' Union, became one of the most attractive and popular speakers of the BritishParliament; one whose aid has been courted and whose rebuke has beenfeared by the ablest of England's representatives. Amid the sneers ofderision and the clamor of hate and prejudice he has triumphed, --on thatvery arena so fatal to Irish eloquence and Irish fame, where even Grattanfailed to sustain himself, and the impetuous spirit of Flood was strickendown. 

No subject in which Ireland was not directly interested has received agreater share of O'Connell's attention than that of the abolition ofcolonial slavery. Utterly detesting tyranny of all kinds, he pouredforth his eloquent soul in stern reprobation of a system full at once ofpride and misery and oppression, and darkened with blood. His speech onthe motion of Thomas Fowell Buxton for the immediate emancipation of theslaves gave a new tone to the discussion of the question. He enteredinto no petty pecuniary details; no miserable computation of theshillings and pence vested in beings fashioned in the image of God. Hedid not talk of the expediency of continuing the evil because it hadgrown monstrous. To use his own words, he considered "slavery a crime tobe abolished; not merely an evil to be palliated. " He left Sir RobertPeel and the Tories to eulogize the characters and defend the interestsof the planters, in common with those of a tithe-reaping priesthood, building their houses by oppression and their chambers by wrong, andspoke of the negro's interest, the negro's claim to justice; demandingsympathy for the plundered as well as the plunderers, for the slave aswell as his master. He trampled as dust under his feet the blasphemythat obedience to the law of eternal justice is a principle to beacknowledged in theory only, because unsafe in practice. He would, he said, enter into no compromise with slavery. He cared not what castor creed or color it might assume, whether personal or political, intellectual or spiritual; he was for its total, immediate abolition. Hewas for justice, --justice in the name of humanity and according to therighteous law of the living God. 

Ardently admiring our free institutions, and constantly pointing to ourglorious political exaltation as an incentive to the perseverance of hisown countrymen in their struggle against oppression, he has yet omittedno opportunity of rebuking our inexcusable slave system. An enthusiasticadmirer of Jefferson, he has often regretted that his practice shouldhave so illy accorded with his noble sentiments on the subject ofslavery, which so fully coincided with his own. In truth, wherever manhas been oppressed by his fellow-man, O'Connell's sympathy has beendirected: to Italy, chained above the very grave of her ancientliberties; to the republics of Southern America; to Greece, dashing thefoot of the indolent Ottoman from her neck; to France and Belgium; andlast, not least, to Poland, driven from her cherished nationality, anddragged, like his own Ireland, bleeding and violated, to the deadlyembrace of her oppressor. American slavery but shares in his commondenunciation of all tyranny; its victims but partake of his common pityfor the oppressed and persecuted and the trodden down. 

In this hasty and imperfect sketch we cannot enter into the details ofthat cruel disregard of Irish rights which was manifested by a ReformedParliament, convoked, to use the language of William IV. , "to ascertainthe sense of the people. " It is perhaps enough to say that O'Connell'sindignant refusal to receive as full justice the measure of reform metedout to Ireland was fully justified by the facts of the case. The IrishReform Bill gave Ireland, with one third of the entire population of theUnited Kingdoms, only one sixth of the Parliamentary delegation. Itdiminished instead of increasing the number of voters; in the towns andcities it created a high and aristocratic franchise; in many boroughs itestablished so narrow a basis of franchise as to render them liable tocorruption and abuse as the rotten boroughs of the old system. It threwno new power into the hands of the people; and with no little justice hasO'Connell himself termed it an act to restore to power the Orangeascendancy in Ireland, and to enable a faction to trample with impunityon the friends of reform and constitutional freedom. [Letters to theReformers of Great Britain, No. 1. ]

In May, 1832, O'Connell commenced the publication of his celebrated_Letters to the Reformers of Great Britain_. Like Tallien, before theFrench convention, he "rent away the veil" which Hume and Atwood had onlypartially lifted. He held up before the people of Great Britain the newindignities which had been added to the long catalogue of Ireland'swrongs; he appealed to their justice, their honor, their duty, forredress, and cast down before the Whig administration the gauntlet of hiscountry's defiance and scorn. There is a fine burst of indignant Irishfeeling in the concluding paragraphs of his fourth letter:--

"I have demonstrated the contumelious injuries inflicted upon us by thisReform Bill. My letters are long before the public. They have beenunrefuted, uncontradicted in any of their details. And with this case ofatrocious injustice to Ireland placed before the reformers of GreatBritain, what assistance, what sympathy, do we receive? Why, I have gotsome half dozen drivelling letters from political unions and politicalcharacters, asking me whether I advise them to petition or bestirthemselves in our behalf!

"Reformers of Great Britain! I do not ask you either to petition or besilent. I do not ask you to petition or to do any other act in favor ofthe Irish. You will consult your own feelings of justice and generosity, unprovoked by any advice or entreaty of mine. 

"For my own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not, I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtainedfreedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shakenoff the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out itsfolly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herselfjustice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at Britishneglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, norany want of moral energy on her part to attain her own rights bypeaceable and legal means. "

The tithe system, unutterably odious and full of all injustice, hadprepared the way for this expression of feeling on the part of thepeople. Ireland had never, in any period of her history, bowed her neckpeaceably to the ecclesiastical yoke. From the Canon of Cashel, preparedby English deputies in the twelfth century, decreeing for the first timethat tithes should be paid in Ireland, down to the present moment, theChurch in her borders has relied solely upon the strong arm of the law, and literally reaped its tithes with the sword. The decree of the DublinSynod, under Archbishop Comyn, in 1185, could only be enforced within thepale of the English settlement. The attempts of Henry VIII. Also failed. Without the pale all endeavors to collect tithes were met by sternopposition. And although from the time of William III. The tithe systemhas been established in Ireland, yet at no period has it been regardedotherwise than as a system of legalized robbery by seven eighths of thepeople. An examination of this system cannot fail to excite our wonder, not that it has been thus regarded, but that it has been so long enduredby any people on the face of the earth, least of all by Irishmen. Tithesto the amount of L1, 000, 000 are annually wrung from impoverished Ireland, in support of a clergy who can only number about one sixteenth of herpopulation as their hearers; and wrung, too, in an undue proportion, fromthe Catholic counties. [See Dr. Doyle's Evidence before Hon. E. G. Stanley. ] In the southern and middle counties, almost entirely inhabitedby the Catholic peasantry, every thing they possess is subject to thetithe: the cow is seized in the hovel, the potato in the barrel, the coateven on the poor man's back. [Speech of T. Reynolds, Esq. , at an anti-tithe meeting. ] The revenues of five of the dignitaries of the IrishChurch Establishment are as follows: the Primacy L140, 000; DerryL120, 000; Kilmore L100, 000; Clogher L100, 000; Waterford L70, 000. Comparethese enormous sums with that paid by Scotland for the maintenance of theChurch, namely L270, 000. Yet that Church has 2, 000, 000 souls under itscare, while that of Ireland has not above 500, 000. Nor are theseprincely livings expended in Ireland by their possessors. The bishopricsof Cloyne and Meath have been long held by absentees, --by men who know nomore of their flocks than the non-resident owner of a West Indiaplantation did of the miserable negroes, the fruits of whose thanklesslabor were annually transmitted to him. Out of 1289 benefited clergymenin Ireland, between five and six hundred are non-residents, spending inBath and London, or in making the fashionable tour of the Continent, thewealth forced from the Catholic peasant and the Protestant dissenter bythe bayonets of the military. Scorching and terrible was the sarcasm ofGrattan applied to these locusts of the Church: "A beastly and pompouspriesthood, political potentates and Christian pastors, full of falsezeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony, empty of the truereligion, to their flocks oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, totheir king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar, --they stand onthe altar as a stepping-stone to the throne, glorying in the ear ofprinces, whom they poison with crooked principles and heated advice; afaction against their king when they are not his slaves, --ever the dirtunder his feet or a poniard to his heart. "

For the evils of absenteeism, the non-residence of the wealthylandholders, draining from a starving country the very necessaries oflife, a remedy is sought in a repeal of the union, and the provisions ofa domestic parliament. In O'Connell's view, a restoration of such aparliament can alone afford that adequate protection to the nationalindustry so loudly demanded by thousands of unemployed laborers, starvingamid the ruins of deserted manufactories. During the brief period ofpartial Irish liberty which followed the pacific revolution of '82, themanufactures of the country revived and flourished; and the smile ofcontented industry was visible all over the land. In 1797 there were15, 000 silk-weavers in the city of Dublin alone. There are now but 400. Such is the practical effect of the Union, of that suicidal act of theIrish Parliament which yielded up in a moment of treachery and terror thedearest interests of the country to the legislation of an EnglishParliament and the tender mercies of Castlereagh, --of that Castlereaghwho, when accused by Grattan of spending L15, 000 in purchasing votes forthe Union, replied with the rare audacity of high-handed iniquity, "Wedid spend L15, 000, and we would have spent L15, 000, 000 if necessary tocarry the Union; "that Castlereagh who, when 707, 000 Irishmen petitionedagainst the Union and 300, 000 for it, maintained that the latterconstituted the majority! Well has it been said that the deep vengeancewhich Ireland owed him was inflicted by the great criminal upon himself. The nation which he sold and plundered saw him make with his own hand thefearful retribution. The great body of the Irish people never assentedto the Union. The following extract from a speech of Earl (then Mr. )Grey, in 1800, upon the Union question, will show what means were madeuse of to drag Ireland, while yet mourning over her slaughtered children, to the marriage altar with England: "If the Parliament of Ireland hadbeen left to itself, untempted and unawed, it would without hesitationhave rejected the resolutions. Out of the 300 members, 120 strenuouslyopposed the measure, 162 voted for it: of these, 116 were placemen; someof them were English generals on the staff, without a foot of ground inIreland, and completely dependent on government. " "Let us reflect uponthe arts made use of since the last session of the Irish Parliament topack a majority, for Union, in the House of Commons. All persons holdingoffices under government, if they hesitated to vote as directed, werestripped of all their employments. A bill framed for preserving thepurity of Parliament was likewise abused, and no less than 63 seats werevacated by their holders having received nominal offices. "

The signs of the times are most favorable to the success of the IrishLiberator. The tremendous power of the English political unions isbeginning to develop itself in favor of Ireland. A deep sympathy isevinced for her sufferings, and a general determination to espouse hercause. Brute force cannot put down the peaceable and legal agitation ofthe question of her rights and interests. The spirit of the age forbidsit. The agitation will go on, for it is spreading among men who, to usethe words of the eloquent Shiel, while looking out upon the ocean, andgazing upon the shore, which Nature has guarded with so many of herbulwarks, can hear the language of Repeal muttered in the dashing of thevery waves which separate them from Great Britain by a barrier of God'sown creation. Another bloodless victory, we trust, awaits O'Connell, --avictory worthy of his heart and intellect, unstained by one drop of humanblood, unmoistened by a solitary tear. 

Ireland will be redeemed and disenthralled, not perhaps by a repeal ofthe Union, but by the accomplishment of such a thorough reform in thegovernment and policy of Great Britain as shall render a repealunnecessary and impolitic. 

The sentiments of O'Connell in regard to the means of effecting hisobject of political reform are distinctly impressed upon all his appealsto the people. In his letter of December, 1832, to the Dublin TradesUnion, he says: "The Repealers must not have our cause stained withblood. Far indeed from it. We can, and ought to, carry the repeal onlyin the total absence of offence against the laws of man or crime in thesight of God. The best revolution which was ever effected could not beworth one drop of human blood. " In his speech at the public dinner givenhim by--the citizens of Cork, we find a yet more earnest avowal ofpacific principles. "It may be stated, " said he, "to countervail ourefforts, that this struggle will involve the destruction of life andproperty; that it will overturn the framework of civil society, and givean undue and fearful influence to one rank to the ruin of all others. These are awful considerations, truly, if risked. I am one of those whohave always believed that any political change is too dearly purchased bya single drop of blood, and who think that any political superstructurebased upon other opinion is like the sand-supported fabric, --beautiful inthe brief hour of sunshine, but the moment one drop of rain touches thearid basis melting away in wreck and ruin! I am an accountable being; Ihave a soul and a God to answer to, in another and better world, for mythoughts and actions in this. I disclaim here any act of mine whichwould sport with the lives of my fellow-creatures, any amelioration ofour social condition which must be purchased by their blood. And here, in the face of God and of our common country, I protest that if I did notsincerely and firmly believe that the amelioration I desire could beeffected without violence, without any change in the relative scale ofranks in the present social condition of Ireland, except that changewhich all must desire, making each better than it was before, andcementing all in one solid irresistible mass, I would at once give up thestruggle which I have always kept with tyranny. I would withdraw fromthe contest which I have hitherto waged with those who would perpetuateour thraldom. I would not for one moment dare to venture for that whichin costing one human life would cost infinitely too dear. But it willcost no such price. Have we not had within my memory two great politicalrevolutions? And had we them not without bloodshed or violence to thesocial compact? Have we not arrived at a period when physical force andmilitary power yield to moral and intellectual energy. Has not the timeof 'Cedant arma togae' come for us and the other nations of the earth?"

Let us trust that the prediction of O'Connell will be verified; thatreason and intellect are destined, under God, to do that for the nationsof the earth which the physical force of centuries and the red sacrificeof a thousand battle-fields have failed to accomplish. Glorious beyondall others will be the day when "nation shall no more rise up againstnation;" when, as a necessary consequence of the universal acknowledgmentof the rights of man, it shall no longer be in the power of an individualto drag millions into strife, for the unholy gratification of personalprejudice and passion. The reformed governments of Great Britain andFrance, resting, as they do, upon a popular basis, are already tending tothis consummation, for the people have suffered too much from the warlikeambition of their former masters not to have learned that the gains ofpeaceful industry are better than the wages of human butchery. 

Among the great names of Ireland--alike conspicuous, yet widelydissimilar--stand Wellington and O'Connell. The one smote down themodern Alexander upon Waterloo's field of death, but the page of hisreputation is dim with the tears of the widow and the orphan, and darkwith the stain of blood. The other, armed only with the weapons of truthand reason, has triumphed over the oppression of centuries, and opened apeaceful pathway to the Temple of Freedom, through which its Goddess maybe seen, no longer propitiated with human sacrifices, like some foul idolof the East, but clothed in Christian attributes, and smiling in thebeauty of holiness upon the pure hearts and peaceful hands of itsvotaries. The bloodless victories of the latter have all the sublimitywith none of the criminality which attaches itself to the triumphs of theformer. To thunder high truths in the deafened ear of nations, to rousethe better spirit of the age, to soothe the malignant passions of. Assembled and maddened men, to throw open the temple doors of justice tothe abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt, and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth strippedof their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness, --these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened theearth with carnage:--

 "They ask a spirit of more exalted pitch, And courage tempered with a holier fire. "

Of the more recent efforts of O'Connell we need not speak, for no one canread the English periodicals and papers without perceiving that O'Connellis, at this moment, the leading politician, the master mind of theBritish empire. Attempts have been made to prejudice the American mindagainst him by a republication on this side of the water of the false andfoul slanders of his Tory enemies, in reference to what is called the"O'Connell rent, " a sum placed annually in his hands by a gratefulpeople, and which he has devoted scrupulously to the great object ofIreland's political redemption. He has acquired no riches by hispolitical efforts his heart and soul and mind and strength have beendirected to his suffering country and the cause of universal freedom. For this he has deservedly a place in the heart and affections of everyson of Ireland. One million of ransomed slaves in the Britishdependencies will teach their children to repeat the name of O'Connellwith that of Wilberforce and Clarkson. And when the stain and caste ofslavery shall have passed from our own country, he will be regarded asour friend and benefactor, whose faithful rebukes and warnings andeloquent appeals to our pride of character, borne to us across theAtlantic, touched the guilty sensitiveness of the national conscience, and through shame prepared the way for repentance. 

ENGLAND UNDER JAMES II. 

 A review of the first two volumes of Macaulay's _History of England from the Accession of James II_. 

In accordance with the labor-saving spirit of the age, we have in thesevolumes an admirable example of history made easy. Had they beenpublished in his time, they might have found favor in the eyes of thepoet Gray, who declared that his ideal of happiness was "to lie on a sofaand read eternal new romances. "

The style is that which lends such a charm to the author's essays, --brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous. Indeed, herein lies the fault of thework, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts. Its sparklingrhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer. A discriminating and able critic has done the author no injustice insaying that, in attempting to give effect and vividness to his thoughtsand diction, he is often overstrained and extravagant, and that hisepigrammatic style seems better fitted for the glitter of paradox thanthe sober guise of truth. The intelligent and well-informed reader ofthe volume before us will find himself at times compelled to reverse thedecisions of the author, and deliver some unfortunate personage, sect, orclass from the pillory of his rhetoric and the merciless pelting of hisridicule. There is a want of the repose and quiet which we look for ina narrative of events long passed away; we rise from the perusal of thebook pleased and excited, but with not so clear a conception of theactual realities of which it treats as would be desirable. We cannothelp feeling that the author has been somewhat over-scrupulous inavoiding the dulness of plain detail, and the dryness of dates, names, and statistics. The freedom, flowing diction, and sweeping generality ofthe reviewer and essayist are maintained throughout; and, with oneremarkable exception, the _History of England_ might be divided intopapers of magazine length, and published, without any violence topropriety, as a continuation of the author's labors in that department ofliterature in which he confessedly stands without a rival, --historicalreview. 

That exception is, however, no unimportant one. In our view, it is thecrowning excellence of the first volume, --its distinctive feature andprincipal attraction. We refer to the third chapter of the volume, frompage 260 to page 398, --the description of the condition of England at theperiod of the accession of James II. We know of nothing like it in theentire range of historical literature. The veil is lifted up from theEngland of a century and a half ago; its geographical, industrial, social, and moral condition is revealed; and, as the panorama passesbefore us of lonely heaths, fortified farm-houses, bands of robbers, rude country squires doling out the odds and ends of their coarse fareto clerical dependents, --rough roads, serviceable only for horsebacktravelling, --towns with unlighted streets, reeking with filth and offal, --and prisons, damp, loathsome, infected with disease, and swarming withvermin, --we are filled with wonder at the contrast which it presents tothe England of our day. We no longer sigh for "the good old days. " Themost confirmed grumbler is compelled to admit that, bad as things noware, they were far worse a few generations back. Macaulay, in thiselaborate and carefully prepared chapter, has done a good service tohumanity in disabusing well-intentioned ignorance of the melancholynotion that the world is growing worse, and in putting to silence thecant of blind, unreasoning conservatism. 

In 1685 the entire population of England our author estimates at fromfive millions to five millions five hundred thousand. Of the eighthundred thousand families at that period, one half had animal food twicea week. The other half ate it not at all, or at most not oftener thanonce a week. Wheaten, loaves were only seen at the tables of thecomparatively wealthy. Rye, barley, and oats were the food of the vastmajority. The average wages of workingmen was at least one half lessthan is paid in England for the same service at the present day. Onefifth of the people were paupers, or recipients of parish relief. Clothing and bedding were scarce and dear. Education was almost unknownto the vast majority. The houses and shops were not numbered in thecities, for porters, coachmen, and errand-runners could not read. Theshopkeeper distinguished his place of business by painted signs andgraven images. Oxford and Cambridge Universities were little better thanmodern grammar and Latin school in a provincial village. The countrymagistrate used on the bench language too coarse, brutal, and vulgar fora modern tap-room. Fine gentlemen in London vied with each other in thelowest ribaldry and the grossest profanity. The poets of the time, fromDryden to Durfey, ministered to the popular licentiousness. The mostshameless indecency polluted their pages. The theatre and the brothelwere in strict unison. The Church winked at the vice which opposeditself to the austere morality or hypocrisy of Puritanism. The superiorclergy, with a few noble exceptions, were self-seekers and courtiers; theinferior were idle, ignorant hangerson upon blaspheming squires andknights of the shire. The domestic chaplain, of all men living, held themost unenviable position. "If he was permitted to dine with the family, he was expected to content himself with the plainest fare. He might fillhimself with the corned beef and carrots; but as soon as the tarts andcheese-cakes made their appearance he quitted his seat, and stood alooftill he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great partof which he had been excluded. "

Beyond the Trent the country seems at this period to have been in a stateof barbarism. The parishes kept bloodhounds for the purpose of huntingfreebooters. The farm-houses were fortified and guarded. So dangerouswas the country that persons about travelling thither made their wills. Judges and lawyers only ventured therein, escorted by a strong guard ofarmed men. 

The natural resources of the island were undeveloped. The tin mines ofCornwall, which two thousand years before attracted the ships of themerchant princes of Tyre beyond the Pillars of Hercules, were indeedworked to a considerable extent; but the copper mines, which now yieldannually fifteen thousand tons, were entirely neglected. Rock salt wasknown to exist, but was not used to any considerable extent; and only apartial supply of salt by evaporation was obtained. The coal and iron ofEngland are at this time the stable foundations of her industrial andcommercial greatness. But in 1685 the great part of the iron used wasimported. Only about ten thousand tons were annually cast. Now eighthundred thousand is the average annual production. Equally great hasbeen the increase in coal mining. "Coal, " says Macaulay, "though verylittle used in any species of manufacture, was already the ordinary fuelin some districts which were fortunate enough to possess large beds, andin the capital, which could easily be supplied by water carriage. Itseems reasonable to believe that at least one half of the quantity thenextracted from the pits was consumed in London. The, consumption ofLondon seemed to the writers of that age enormous, and was oftenmentioned by them as a proof of the greatness of the imperial city. Theyscarcely hoped to be believed when they affirmed that two hundred andeighty thousand chaldrons--that is to say, about three hundred and fiftythousand tons-were, in the last year of the reign of Charles II. , broughtto the Thames. At present near three millions and a half of tons arerequired yearly by the metropolis; and the whole annual produce cannot, on the most moderate computation, be estimated at less than twentymillions of tons. "

After thus passing in survey the England of our ancestors five or sixgenerations back, the author closes his chapter with some eloquentremarks upon the progress of society. Contrasting the hardness andcoarseness of the age of which he treats with the softer and more humanefeatures of our own, he says: "Nowhere could be found that sensitive andrestless compassion which has in our time extended powerful protection tothe factory child, the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries intothe stores and water-casks of every emigrant ship; which winces at everylash laid on the back of a drunken soldier; which will not suffer thethief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked; and which has repeatedlyendeavored to save the life even of the murderer. The more we study theannals of the past, the more shall we rejoice that we live in a mercifulage, in an age in which cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even whendeserved, is inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. Everyclass, doubtless, has gained largely by this great moral change; but theclass which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and themost defenceless. "

The history itself properly commences at the close of this chapter. Opening with the deathscene of the dissolute Charles II. , it presents aseries of brilliant pictures of the events succeeding: The miserable fateof Oates and Dangerfield, the perjured inventors of the Popish Plot; thetrial of Baxter by the infamous Jeffreys; the ill-starred attempt of theDuke of Monmouth; the battle of Sedgemoor, and the dreadful atrocities ofthe king's soldiers, and the horrible perversion of justice by the king'schief judge in the "Bloody Assizes;" the barbarous hunting of the ScotchDissenters by Claverbouse; the melancholy fate of the brave and nobleDuke of Argyle, --are described with graphic power unknown to Smollett orHume. Personal portraits are sketched with a bold freedom which at timesstartles us. The "old familiar faces, " as we have seen them through thedust of a century and a half, start before us with lifelike distinctnessof outline and coloring. Some of them disappoint us; like the ghost ofHamlet's father, they come in a "questionable shape. " Thus, forinstance, in his sketch of William Penn, the historian takes issue withthe world on his character, and labors through many pages of disingenuousinnuendoes and distortion of facts to transform the saint of history intoa pliant courtier. 

The second volume details the follies and misfortunes, the decline andfall, of the last of the Stuarts. All the art of the author's splendidrhetoric is employed in awakening, by turns, the indignation and contemptof the reader in contemplating the character of the wrong-headed king. In portraying that character, he has brought into exercise all thosepowers of invective and merciless ridicule which give such a savagerelish to his delineation of Barrere. To preserve the consistency ofthis character, he denies the king any credit for whatever was reallybeneficent and praiseworthy in his government. He holds up the royaldelinquent in only two lights: the one representing him as a tyranttowards his people; the other as the abject slave of foreign priests, --a man at once hateful and ludicrous, of whom it is difficult to speakwithout an execration or a sneer. 

The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguisedadherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration ofthe despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of theseverity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing theway for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughoutthe British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priestto build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palacesof Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits andprelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness. The secret springs ofthe great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltryinstrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption, prejudice, and falsehood. No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan ofCatholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in Englishhistory without a feeling of disgust. However it may have been overruledfor good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness, the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as littlecause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as thesubstitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII. , forthat of the Pope, in the English Church. It had little in common withthe revolution of 1642. The field of its action was the closet ofselfish intrigue, --the stalls of discontented prelates, --the chambers ofthe wanton and adulteress, --the confessional of a weak prince, whosemind, originally narrow, had been cramped closer still by the strait-jacket of religious bigotry and superstition. The age of nobility andheroism had well-nigh passed away. The pious fervor, the self-denial, and the strict morality of the Puritanism of the days of Cromwell, andthe blunt honesty and chivalrous loyalty of the Cavaliers, had bothmeasurably given place to the corrupting influences of the licentious andinfidel court of Charles II. ; and to the arrogance, intolerance, andshameless self-seeking of a prelacy which, in its day of triumph andrevenge, had more than justified the terrible denunciations and scathinggibes of Milton. 

Both Catholic and Protestant writers have misrepresented James II. Hedeserves neither the execrations of the one nor the eulogies of theother. The candid historian must admit that he was, after all, a betterman than his brother Charles II. He was a sincere and bigoted Catholic, and was undoubtedly honest in the declaration, which he made in thatunlucky letter which Burnet ferreted out on the Continent, that he wasprepared 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 ofthe cruel temper of his time. He was at once ascetic and sensual, alternating between the hair-shirt of penance and the embraces ofCatharine Sedley. His situation was one of the most difficult andembarrassing which can be conceived of. He was at once a bigoted Papistand a Protestant pope. He hated the French domination to which hisbrother had submitted; yet his pride as sovereign was subordinated to hisallegiance to Rome and a superstitious veneration for the wily priestswith which Louis XIV. Surrounded him. As the head of Anglican heretics, he was compelled to submit to conditions galling alike to the sovereignand the man. He found, on his accession, the terrible penal laws againstthe Papists in full force; the hangman's knife was yet warm with itsghastly butcher-work of quartering and disembowelling suspected Jesuitsand victims of the lie of Titus Oates; the Tower of London had scarcelyceased to echo the groans of Catholic confessors stretched on the rack byProtestant inquisitors. He was torn by conflicting interests andspiritual and political contradictions. The prelates of the EstablishedChurch must share the responsibility of many of the worst acts of theearly part of his reign. Oxford sent up its lawned deputations to minglethe voice of adulation with the groans of tortured Covenanters, andfawning ecclesiastics burned the incense of irreverent flattery under thenostrils of the Lord's anointed, while the blessed air of England wastainted by the carcasses of the ill-fated followers of Monmouth, rottingon a thousand gibbets. While Jeffreys was threatening Baxter and hisPresbyterian friends with the pillory and whipping-post; while Quakersand Baptists were only spared from extermination as game preserves forthe sport of clerical hunters; while the prisons were thronged with theheads of some fifteen thousand beggared families, and Dissenters of everyname and degree were chased from one hiding-place to another, like Davidamong the cliffs of Ziph and the rocks of the wild goats, --thethanksgivings and congratulations of prelacy arose in an unbroken strainof laudation from all the episcopal palaces of England. What mattered itto men, in whose hearts, to use the language of John Milton, "the sourleaven of human traditions, mixed with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisy, lay basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion, hatchingAntichrist, " that the privileges of Englishmen and the rights secured bythe great charter were violated and trodden under foot, so long asusurpation enured to their own benefit? But when King James issued hisDeclaration of Indulgence, and stretched his prerogative on the side oftolerance and charity, the zeal of the prelates for preserving theintegrity of the British constitution and the limiting of the royal powerflamed up into rebellion. They forswore themselves without scruple: thedisciples of Laud, the asserters of kingly infallibility and divineright, talked of usurped power and English rights in the strain of thevery schismatics whom they had persecuted to the death. There is noreason to believe that James supposed that, in issuing his declarationsuspending the penal laws, he had transcended the rightful prerogative ofhis throne. The power which he exercised had been used by hispredecessors for far less worthy purposes, and with the approbation ofmany of the very men who now opposed him. His ostensible object, expressed in language which even those who condemn his policy cannot butadmire, was a laudable and noble one. "We trust, " said he, "that it willnot be vain that we have resolved to use our utmost endeavors toestablish liberty of conscience on such just and equal foundations aswill render it unalterable, and secure to all people the free exercise oftheir religion, by which future ages may reap the benefit of what is soundoubtedly the general good of the whole kingdom. " Whatever may havebeen the motive of this declaration, --even admitting the suspicions ofhis enemies to have been true, that he advocated universal toleration asthe only means of restoring Roman Catholics to all the rights andprivileges of which the penal laws deprived them, --it would seem thatthere could have been no very serious objection on the part of realfriends of religious toleration to the taking of him at his word andplacing Englishmen of every sect on an equality before the law. TheCatholics were in a very small minority, scarcely at that time asnumerous as the Quakers and Anabaptists. The army, the navy, and ninetenths 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 thegreat truth, which is even now but imperfectly recognized throughoutChristendom, that religious opinions rest between man and his Maker, andnot between man and the magistrate, and that the domain of conscience issacred, was almost unknown to the statesmen and schoolmen of theseventeenth century. Milton--ultra liberal as he was--excepted theCatholics from his plan of toleration. Locke, yielding to the prejudicesof the time, took the same ground. The enlightened latitudinarianministers of the Established Church--men whose talents and Christiancharity redeem in some measure the character of that Church in the day ofits greatest power and basest apostasy--stopped short of universaltoleration. The Presbyterians excluded Quakers, Baptists, and Papistsfrom the pale of their charity. With the single exception of the sect ofwhich William Penn was a conspicuous member, the idea of complete andimpartial toleration was novel and unwelcome to all sects and classes ofthe English people. Hence it was that the very men whose liberties andestates had been secured by the declaration, and who were therebypermitted to hold their meetings in peace and quietness, used their newlyacquired freedom in denouncing the king, because the same key which hadopened 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 byextending the same favor to Jesuits and Ranters. Bunyan disliked theQuakers next to the Papists; and it greatly lessened his satisfaction athis release from Bedford jail that it had been brought about by theinfluence of the former at the court of a Catholic prince. Dissentersforgot the wrongs and persecutions which they had experienced at thehands of the prelacy, and joined the bishops in opposition to thedeclaration. They almost magnified into Christian confessors theprelates who remonstrated against the indulgence, and actually plottedagainst 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 onlysecurity against the heavier one of Papist supremacy. In a far differentmanner the cleareyed and plain-spoken John Milton met the claims anddemands of the hierarchy in his time. "They entreat us, " said he, "thatwe be not weary of the insupportable grievances that our shoulders havehitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we think them fit to be ourjustices of peace, our lords, our highest officers of state. They prayus that it would please us to let them still haul us and wrong us withtheir bandogs and pursuivants; and that it would please the Parliamentthat they may yet have the whipping, fleecing, and flaying of us in theirdiabolical courts, to tear the flesh from our bones, and into our widewounds, instead of balm, to pour in the oil of tartar, vitriol, andmercury. Surely a right, reasonable, innocent, and soft-heartedpetition! O the relenting bowels of the fathers!"

Considering the prominent part acted by William Penn in the reign ofJames II. , and his active and influential support of the obnoxiousdeclaration which precipitated the revolution of 1688, it could hardlyhave been otherwise than that his character should suffer from theunworthy suspicions and prejudices of his contemporaries. His views ofreligious toleration were too far in advance of the age to be receivedwith favor. They were of necessity misunderstood and misrepresented. All his life he had been urging them with the earnestness of one whoseconvictions were the result, not so much of human reason as of what heregarded as divine illumination. What the council of James yielded upongrounds 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 inauthority for universal toleration and charity. On a sudden, on theaccession of James, the friend of himself and his family, he foundhimself the most influential untitled citizen in the British realm. He had free access to the royal ear. Asking nothing for himself or hisrelatives, he demanded only that the good people of England should be nolonger despoiled of liberty and estate for their religious opinions. James, as a Catholic, had in some sort a common interest with hisdissenting subjects, and the declaration was for their common relief. Penn, conscious of the rectitude of his own motives and thoroughlyconvinced of the Christian duty of toleration, welcomed that declarationas the precursor of the golden age of liberty and love and good-will tomen. He was not the man to distrust the motives of an act so fully inaccordance with his lifelong aspirations and prayers. He was charitableto a fault: his faith in his fellow-men was often stronger than a clearerinsight of their characters would have justified. He saw the errors ofthe king, and deplored them; he denounced Jeffreys as a butcher who hadbeen let loose by the priests; and pitied the king, who was, he thought, swayed by evil counsels. He remonstrated against the interference of theking with Magdalen College; and reproved and rebuked the hopes and aimsof the more zealous and hot-headed Catholics, advising them to be contentwith simple toleration. But the constitution of his mind fitted himrather 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 Puritanreformers. He disliked their violence and harshness; while, on the otherhand, he was attracted and pleased by the gentle disposition and mildcounsels of Locke, and Tillotson, and the latitudinarians of the EnglishChurch. He was the intimate personal and political friend of AlgernonSydney; sympathized with his republican theories, and shared hisabhorrence of tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical. He found in him a manafter his own heart, --genial, generous, and loving; faithful to duty andthe instincts of humanity; a true Christian gentleman. His sense ofgratitude was strong, and his personal friendships sometimes clouded hisjudgment. In giving his support to the measures of James in behalf ofliberty of conscience, it must be admitted that he acted in consistencywith his principles and professions. To have taken ground against them, he must have given the lie to his declarations from his youth upward. Hecould not disown and deny his own favorite doctrine because it came fromthe lips of a Catholic king and his Jesuit advisers; and in thus risingabove the prejudices of his time, and appealing to the reason andhumanity of the people of England in favor of a cordial indorsement onthe part of Parliament of the principles of the declaration, he believedthat he was subserving the best interests of his beloved country andfulfilling the solemn obligations of religious duty. The downfall ofJames exposed Penn to peril and obloquy. Perjured informers endeavoredto swear away his life; and, although nothing could be proved against himbeyond the fact that he had steadily supported the great measure oftoleration, he was compelled to live secluded in his private lodgings inLondon for two or three years, with a proclamation for his arrest hangingover his head. At length, the principal informer against him having beenfound guilty of perjury, the government warrant was withdrawn; and LordsSidney, Rochester, and Somers, and the Duke of Buckingham, publicly boretestimony that nothing had been urged against him save by impostors, andthat "they had known him, some of them, for thirty years, and had neverknown him to do an ill thing, but many good offices. " It is a matter ofregret that one professing to hold the impartial pen of history shouldhave given the sanction of his authority to the slanderous and falseimputations of such a man as Burnet, who has never been regarded as anauthentic chronicler. The pantheon of history should not be lightlydisturbed. A good man's character is the world's common legacy; andhumanity is not so rich in models of purity and goodness as to be able tosacrifice such a reputation as that of William Penn to the point of anantithesis 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 theMerrimac River, was occupied a century and a half ago by some thirtydwellings, 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 tocomparatively spacious and commodious habitations, framed and coveredwith sawed boards, and cloven clapboards, or shingles. They were, manyof them, two stories in front, with the roof sloping off behind to asingle one; the windows few and small, and frequently so fitted as to beopened with difficulty, and affording but a scanty supply of light andair. Two or three of the best constructed were occupied as garrisons, where, in addition to the family, small companies of soldiers werequartered. On the high grounds rising from the river stood the mansionsof the well-defined aristocracy of the little settlement, --larger andmore imposing, with projecting upper stories and carved cornices. On thefront of one of these, over the elaborately wrought entablature of thedoorway, might be seen the armorial bearings of the honored family ofSaltonstall. Its hospitable door was now closed; no guests filled itsspacious hall or partook of the rich delicacies of its ample larder. Death had been there; its venerable and respected occupant had just beenborne by his peers in rank and station to the neighboring graveyard. Learned, affable, intrepid, a sturdy asserter of the rights and libertiesof the Province, and so far in advance of his time as to refuse to yieldto the terrible witchcraft delusion, vacating his seat on the bench andopenly expressing his disapprobation of the violent and sanguinaryproceedings of the court, wise in council and prompt in action, --not hisown townsmen alone, but the people of the entire Province, had reason tomourn the loss of Nathaniel Saltonstall. 

Four years before the events of which we are about to speak, the Indianallies of the French in Canada suddenly made their appearance in thewesterly part of the settlement. At the close of a midwinter day sixsavages rushed into the open gate of a garrison-house owned by oneBradley, who appears to have been absent at the time. A sentinel, stationed in the house, discharged his musket, killing the foremostIndian, 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 theassailants, scalding one of them severely, and was only captured aftersuch a resistance as can scarcely be conceived of by the delicatelyframed and tenderly nurtured occupants of the places of our great-grandmothers. After plundering the house, the Indians started on theirlong 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 groundwas covered with deep snow, and the captives were compelled to carryheavy burdens of their plundered household-stuffs; while for many days insuccession they had no other sustenance than bits of hide, ground-nuts, the bark of trees, and the roots of wild onions, and lilies. In thissituation, in the cold, wintry forest, and unattended, the unhappy youngwoman gave birth to a child. Its cries irritated the savages, whocruelly treated it and threatened its life. To the entreaties of themother they replied, that they would spare it on the condition that itshould be baptized after their fashion. She gave the little innocentinto their hands, when with mock solemnity they made the sign of thecross upon its forehead, by gashing it with their knives, and afterwardsbarbarously put it to death before the eyes of its mother, seeming toregard the whole matter as an excellent piece of sport. Nothing sostrongly excited the risibilities of these grim barbarians as the tearsand cries of their victims, extorted by physical or mental agony. Capricious alike in their cruelties and their kindnesses, they treatedsome of their captives with forbearance and consideration and tormentedothers apparently without cause. One man, on his way to Canada, waskilled 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, whowas suffering greatly from the effects of the scalding soap, was deridedand mocked as a "fool who had let a squaw whip him;" while on the otherhand the energy and spirit manifested by Goodwife Bradley in her defencewas a constant theme of admiration, and gained her so much respect amongher captors as to protect her from personal injury or insult. On herarrival in Canada she was sold to a French farmer, by whom she was kindlytreated. 

In the mean time her husband made every exertion in his power toascertain her fate, and early in the next year learned that she was aslave in Canada. He immediately set off through the wilderness on foot, accompanied only by his dog, who drew a small sled, upon which he carriedsome provisions for his sustenance, and a bag of snuff, which theGovernor of the Province gave him as a present to the Governor of Canada. After encountering almost incredible hardships and dangers with aperseverance which shows how well he appreciated the good qualities ofhis stolen helpmate, he reached Montreal and betook himself to theGovernor's residence. Travel-worn, ragged, and wasted with cold andhunger, he was ushered into the presence of M. Vaudreuil. The courtlyFrenchman civilly received the gift of the bag of snuff, listened to thepoor fellow's story, and put him in a way to redeem his wife withoutdifficulty. The joy of the latter on seeing her husband in the strangeland 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 ofIndian captivity. The late Dr. Abiel Abbott, in his manuscript of JudithWhiting's _Recollections of the Indian Wars_, states that she hadpreviously been a prisoner, probably before her marriage. After herreturn she lived quietly at the garrison-house until the summer of thenext year. One bright moonlit-night a party of Indians were seensilently and cautiously approaching. The only occupants of the garrisonat that time were Bradley, his wife and children, and a servant. Thethree adults armed themselves with muskets, and prepared to defendthemselves. Goodwife Bradley, supposing the Indians had come with theintention of again capturing her, encouraged her husband to fight to thelast, declaring that she had rather die on her own hearth than fall intotheir hands. The Indians rushed upon the garrison, and assailed thethick oaken door, which they forced partly open, when a well-aimed shotfrom Goodwife Bradley laid the foremost dead on the threshold. The lossof their leader so disheartened them that they made a hasty retreat. 

The year 1707 passed away without any attack upon the exposed frontiersettlement. A feeling of comparative security succeeded to the almostsleepless anxiety and terror of the inhabitants; and they were beginningto congratulate each other upon the termination of their long and bittertrials. But the end was not yet. 

Early in the spring of 1708, the principal tribes of Indians in alliancewith the French held a great council, and agreed to furnish three hundredwarriors 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 thenobility, adventurous and unscrupulous. The Sieur de Chaillons, andHertel 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 generalorders of La Perriere. A Catholic priest accompanied them. De Ronville, with the French troops and a portion of the Indians, took the route bythe River St. Francois about the middle of summer. La Perriere, with theFrench Mohawks, crossed Lake Champlain. The place of rendezvous was LakeNickisipigue. On the way a Huron accidentally killed one of hiscompanions; whereupon the tribe insisted on halting and holding acouncil. It was gravely decided that this accident was an evil omen, andthat the expedition would prove disastrous; and, in spite of theendeavors of the French officers, the whole band deserted. Next theMohawks became dissatisfied, and refused to proceed. To the entreatiesand promises of their French allies they replied that an infectiousdisease had broken out among them, and that, if they remained, it wouldspread through the whole army. The French partisans were not deceived bya falsehood so transparent; but they were in no condition to enforceobedience; and, with bitter execrations and reproaches, they saw theMohawks turn back on their warpath. The diminished army pressed on toNickisipigue, 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 theEastern tribes had broken their pledge of cooperation. Under thesecircumstances a council was held; and the original design of theexpedition, namely, the destruction of the whole line of frontier towns, beginning with Portsmouth, was abandoned. They had still a sufficientforce for the surprise of a single settlement; and Haverhill, on theMerrimac, was selected for conquest. 

In the mean time, intelligence of the expedition, greatly exaggerated inpoint of numbers and object, had reached Boston, and Governor Dudley haddespatched troops to the more exposed out posts of the Provinces ofMassachusetts and New Hampshire. Forty men, under the command of MajorTurner and Captains Price and Gardner, were stationed at Haverhill in thedifferent garrison-houses. At first a good degree of vigilance wasmanifested; but, as days and weeks passed without any alarm, theinhabitants relapsed into their old habits; and some even began tobelieve that the rumored descent of the Indians was only a pretext forquartering upon them two-score of lazy, rollicking soldiers, whocertainly seemed more expert in making love to their daughters, anddrinking their best ale and cider, than in patrolling the woods orputting the garrisons into a defensible state. The grain and hay harvestended without disturbance; the men worked in their fields, and the womenpursued their household avocations, without any very serious apprehensionof danger. 

Among the inhabitants of the village was an eccentric, ne'er-do-wellfellow, named Keezar, who led a wandering, unsettled life, oscillating, like a crazy pendulum, between Haverhill and Amesbury. He had asmattering of a variety of trades, was a famous wrestler, and for a mugof ale would leap over an ox-cart with the unspilled beverage in hishand. On one occasion, when at supper, his wife complained that she hadno 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 thecity, and returned with his ware by sunrise the next morning, passingover a distance of between sixty and seventy miles. The tradition of hisstrange habits, feats of strength, and wicked practical jokes is stillcommon in his native town. On the morning of the 29th of the eighthmonth he was engaged in taking home his horse, which, according to hiscustom, he had turned into his neighbor's rich clover field the eveningprevious. By the gray light of dawn he saw a long file of men marchingsilently towards the town. He hurried back to the village and gave thealarm by firing a gun. Previous to this, however, a young man belongingto a neighboring town, who had been spending the night with a young womanof the village, had met the advance of the war-party, and, turning backin extreme terror and confusion, thought only of the safety of hisbetrothed, and passed silently through a considerable part of the villageto her dwelling. After he had effectually concealed her he ran out togive the alarm. But it was too late. Keezar's gun was answered by theterrific yells, whistling, and whooping of the Indians. House afterhouse was assailed and captured. Men, women, and children weremassacred. The minister of the town was killed by a shot through hisdoor. Two of his children were saved by the courage and sagacity of hisnegro slave Hagar. She carried them into the cellar and covered themwith tubs, and then crouched behind a barrel of meat just in time toescape the vigilant eyes of the enemy, who entered the cellar andplundered it. She saw them pass and repass the tubs under which thechildren lay and take meat from the very barrel which concealed herself. Three soldiers were quartered in the house; but they made no defence, andwere killed while begging for quarter. 

The wife of Thomas Hartshorne, after her husband and three sons hadfallen, took her younger children into the cellar, leaving an infant on abed in the garret, fearful that its cries would betray her place ofconcealment if she took it with her. The Indians entered the garret andtossed the child out of the window upon a pile of clapboards, where itwas afterwards found stunned and insensible. It recovered, nevertheless, and became a man of remarkable strength and stature; and it used to be astanding joke with his friends that he had been stinted by the Indianswhen they threw him out of the window. Goodwife Swan, armed with a longspit, successfully defended her door against two Indians. While themassacre went on, the priest who accompanied the expedition, with some ofthe French officers, went into the meeting-house, the walls of which wereafterwards found written over with chalk. At sunrise, Major Turner, witha portion of his soldiers, entered the village; and the enemy made arapid retreat, carrying with them seventeen, prisoners. They werepursued and overtaken just as they were entering the woods; and a severeskirmish took place, in which the rescue of some of the prisoners waseffected. Thirty of the enemy were left dead on the field, including theinfamous Hertel de Rouville. On the part of the villagers, Captains Ayerand Wainwright and Lieutenant Johnson, with thirteen others, were killed. The intense heat of the weather made it necessary to bury the dead on thesame 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 ofhis wife and child, sleep in another part of the burial-ground, where maystill be seen a rude monument with its almost llegible inscription:--

"_Clauditur hoc tumulo corpus Reverendi pii doctique viri D. BenjaminRolfe, ecclesiae Christi quae est in Haverhill pastoris fidelissimi; quidomi suae ab hostibus barbare trucidatus. A laboribus suis requievitmane diei sacrae quietis, Aug. XXIX, anno Dom. MDCCVIII. AEtatis suaeXLVI_. "

Of the prisoners taken, some escaped during the skirmish, and two orthree were sent back by the French officers, with a message to theEnglish soldiers, that, if they pursued the party on their retreat toCanada, the other prisoners should be put to death. One of them, asoldier stationed in Captain Wainwright's garrison, on his return fouryears after, published an account of his captivity. He was compelled tocarry 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 theIndians shaved one side of his head, and greased the other, and paintedhis face. At a fort nine miles from Montreal a council was held in orderto decide his fate; and he had the unenviable privilege of listening to aprotracted discussion upon the expediency of burning him. The fire wasalready kindled, and the poor fellow was preparing to meet his doom withfirmness, when it was announced to him that his life was spared. Thisresult of the council by no means satisfied the women and boys, who hadanticipated rare sport in the roasting of a white man and a heretic. Onesquaw assailed him with a knife and cut off one of his fingers; anotherbeat him with a pole. The Indians spent the night in dancing andsinging, compelling their prisoner to go round the ring with them. Inthe morning one of their orators made a long speech to him, and formallydelivered him over to an old squaw, who took him to her wigwam andtreated him kindly. Two or three of the young women who were carriedaway captive married Frenchmen in Canada and never returned. Instancesof this kind were by no means rare during the Indian wars. The simplemanners, gayety, and social habits of the French colonists among whom thecaptives were dispersed seem to have been peculiarly fascinating to thedaughters of the grave and severe Puritans. 

At the beginning of the present century, Judith Whiting was the solitarysurvivor of all who witnessed the inroad of the French and Indians in1708. She was eight years of age at the time of the attack, and hermemory 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 hadbeen 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 thesublime, the grotesque and the pathetic, jostle each other on the stage;the jester, with his cap and bells, struts alongside of the hero; thelord mayor's pageant loses itself in the mob around Punch and Judy; thepomp and circumstance of war become mirth-provoking in a militia muster;and the majesty of the law is ridiculous in the mock dignity of ajustice's court. The laughing philosopher of old looked on one side oflife and his weeping contemporary on the other; but he who has an eye toboth must often experience that contrariety of feeling which Sternecompares 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 ofthe 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 partand parcel of its history in the northeastern section of Massachusetts. 

About midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport, thetraveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and thesea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs andvenerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping offto the seaside, forms a green background. This is Ipswich, the ancientAgawam; one of those steady, conservative villages, of which a few arestill left in New England, wherein a contemporary of Cotton Mather andGovernor Endicott, were he permitted to revisit the scenes of his painfulprobation, 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 itspicturesque stone bridge; and beyond is the famous female seminary, whereAndover theological students are wont to take unto themselves wives ofthe daughters of the Puritans. An air of comfort and quiet broods overthe whole town. Yellow moss clings to the seaward sides of the roofs;one's eyes are not endangered by the intense glare of painted shinglesand clapboards. The smoke of hospitable kitchens curls up through theovershadowing elms from huge-throated chimneys, whose hearth-stones havebeen worn by the feet of many generations. The tavern was once renownedthroughout New England, and it is still a creditable hostelry. Duringcourt time it is crowded with jocose lawyers, anxious clients, sleepyjurors, and miscellaneous hangers on; disinterested gentlemen, who haveno particular business of their own in court, but who regularly attendits sessions, weighing evidence, deciding upon the merits of a lawyer'splea or a judge's charge, getting up extempore trials upon the piazza orin the bar-room of cases still involved in the glorious uncertainty ofthe law in the court-house, proffering gratuitous legal advice toirascible plaintiffs and desponding defendants, and in various other waysseeing that the Commonwealth receives no detriment. In the autumn oldsportsmen make the tavern their headquarters while scouring the marshesfor sea-birds; and slim young gentlemen from the city return thither withempty game-bags, as guiltless in respect to the snipes and wagtails asWinkle was in the matter of the rooks, after his shooting excursion atDingle Dell. Twice, nay, three times, a year, since third parties havebeen in fashion, the delegates of the political churches assemble inIpswich to pass patriotic resolutions, and designate the candidates whomthe good people of Essex County, with implicit faith in the wisdom of theselection, are expected to vote for. For the rest there are pleasantwalks and drives around the picturesque village. The people are notedfor their hospitality; in summer the sea-wind blows cool over its healthyhills, and, take it for all in all, there is not a better preserved orpleasanter specimen of a Puritan town remaining in the ancientCommonwealth. 

The 21st of April, 1775, witnessed an awful commotion in the littlevillage of Ipswich. Old men, and boys, (the middle-aged had marched toLexington some days before) and all the women in the place who were notbedridden or sick, came rushing as with one accord to the green in frontof the meeting-house. A rumor, which no one attempted to trace orauthenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landedon the coast and were marching upon the town. A scene of indescribableterror and confusion followed. Defence was out of the question, as theyoung and able-bodied men of the entire region round about had marched toCambridge and Lexington. The news of the battle at the latter place, exaggerated in all its details, had been just received; terrible storiesof the atrocities committed by the dreaded "regulars" had been related;and it was believed that nothing short of a general extermination of thepatriots--men, women, and children--was contemplated by the Britishcommander. --Almost simultaneously the people of Beverly, a village a fewmiles distant, were smitten with the same terror. How the rumor wascommunicated no one could tell. It was there believed that the enemy hadfallen upon Ipswich, and massacred the inhabitants without regard to ageor sex. 

It was about the middle of the afternoon of this day that the people ofNewbury, ten miles farther north, assembled in an informal meeting, atthe town-house to hear accounts from the Lexington fight, and to considerwhat action was necessary in consequence of that event. Parson Carey wasabout opening the meeting with prayer when hurried hoof-beats sounded upthe street, and a messenger, loose-haired and panting for breath, rushedup the staircase. "Turn out, turn out, for God's sake, " he cried, "oryou will be all killed! The regulars are marching onus; they are atIpswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!" Universalconsternation was the immediate result of this fearful announcement;Parson Carey's prayer died on his lips; the congregation dispersed overthe town, carrying to every house the tidings that the regulars had come. Men on horseback went galloping up and down the streets, shouting thealarm. Women and children echoed it from every corner. The panic becameirresistible, uncontrollable. Cries were heard that the dreaded invadershad reached Oldtown Bridge, a little distance from the village, and thatthey 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 threwtheir silver and pewter ware and other valuables into wells. Largenumbers crossed the Merrimac, and spent the night in the deserted housesof Salisbury, whose inhabitants, stricken by the strange terror, had fledinto New Hampshire, to take up their lodgings in dwellings also abandonedby their owners. A few individuals refused to fly with the multitude;some, unable to move by reason of sickness, were left behind by theirrelatives. One old gentleman, whose excessive corpulence renderedretreat on his part impossible, made a virtue of necessity; and, seatinghimself in his doorway with his loaded king's arm, upbraided his morenimble neighbors, advising them to do as he did, and "stop and shoot thedevils. " Many ludicrous instances of the intensity of the terror mightbe related. One man got his family into a boat to go to Ram Island forsafety. He imagined he was pursued by the enemy through the dusk of theevening, and was annoyed by the crying of an infant in the after part ofthe boat. "Do throw that squalling brat overboard, " he called to hiswife, "or we shall be all discovered and killed!" A poor woman ran fouror five miles up the river, and stopped to take breath and nurse herchild, when she found to her great horror that she had brought off thecat instead of the baby!

All through that memorable night the terror swept onward towards thenorth with a speed which seems almost miraculous, producing everywherethe same results. At midnight a horseman, clad only in shirt andbreeches, dashed by our grandfather's door, in Haverhill, twenty miles upthe river. "Turn out! Get a musket! Turn out!" he shouted; "theregulars are landing on Plum Island!" "I'm glad of it, " responded theold gentleman from his chamber window; "I wish they were all there, andobliged to stay there. " When it is understood that Plum Island is littlemore than a naked sand-ridge, the benevolence of this wish can be readilyappreciated. 

All the boats on the river were constantly employed for several hours inconveying across the terrified fugitives. Through "the dead waste andmiddle of the night" they fled over the border into New Hampshire. Somefeared to take the frequented roads, and wandered over wooded hills andthrough swamps where the snows of the late winter had scarcely melted. They heard the tramp and outcry of those behind them, and fancied thatthe sounds were made by pursuing enemies. Fast as they fled, the terror, by some unaccountable means, outstripped them. They found housesdeserted and streets strewn with household stuffs, abandoned in the hurryof escape. Towards morning, however, the tide partially turned. Grownmen began to feel ashamed of their fears. The old Anglo-Saxon hardihoodpaused 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 toretrace their steps. In the mean time such of the good people of Ipswichas were unable or unwilling to leave their homes became convinced thatthe terrible rumor which had nearly depopulated their settlement wasunfounded. 

Among those who had there awaited the onslaught of the regulars was ayoung man from Exeter, New Hampshire. Becoming satisfied that the wholematter was a delusion, he mounted his horse and followed after theretreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook. Late at nighthe reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleeplessinhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode thewelcome tidings. The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, wornwith excitement and fatigue, slowly returning homeward, theirsatisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasantconsciousness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting. 

Any inference which might be drawn from the foregoing narrativederogatory to the character of the people of New England at that day, onthe score of courage, would be essentially erroneous. It is true, theywere not the men to court danger or rashly throw away their lives for themere glory of the sacrifice. They had always a prudent and wholesomeregard to their own comfort and safety; they justly looked upon soundheads and limbs as better than broken ones; life was to them too seriousand important, and their hard-gained property too valuable, to be lightlyhazarded. They never attempted to cheat themselves by under-estimatingthe difficulty to be encountered, or shutting their eyes to its probableconsequences. Cautious, wary, schooled in the subtle strategy of Indianwarfare, where self-preservation is by no means a secondary object, theyhad little in common with the reckless enthusiasm of their French allies, or the stolid indifference of the fighting machines of the Britishregular army. When danger could no longer be avoided, they met it withfirmness and iron endurance, but with a very vivid appreciation of itsmagnitude. Indeed, it must be admitted by all who are familiar with thehistory of our fathers that the element of fear held an important placeamong their characteristics. It exaggerated all the dangers of theirearthly pilgrimage, and peopled the future with shapes of evil. Theirfear of Satan invested him with some of the attributes of Omnipotence, and almost reached the point of reverence. The slightest shock of anearthquake filled all hearts with terror. Stout men trembled by theirhearths with dread of some paralytic old woman supposed to be a witch. And when they believed themselves called upon to grapple with theseterrors and endure the afflictions of their allotment, they brought tothe trial a capability of suffering undiminished by the chloroform ofmodern philosophy. They were heroic in endurance. Panics like the onewe have described might bow and sway them like reeds in the wind; butthey stood up like the oaks of their own forests beneath the thunder andthe hail of actual calamity. 

It was certainly lucky for the good people of Essex County that no wickedwag 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 Chepatchetdemonstration in Rhode Island, and the "Sauk fuss" of Wisconsin, itremains to this day "unsyllabled, unsung;" and the fast-fading memory ofage 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 inGreat Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems tohave revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport, which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the "No Popery" mob, hadvery generally fallen into disuse. On the 5th of the eleventh month ofthis present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted upwith bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot"of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605. Popes, bishops, and cardinals, instraw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amidthe shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtlessbeen quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishopof Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about andburned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one. 

In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legalrestrictions, each ecclesiastical tub balancing itself as it best may onits own bottom, and where bishops Catholic and bishops Episcopal, bishopsMethodist and bishops Mormon, jostle each other in our thoroughfares, itis not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter atissue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water. Itis a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as itcannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of thespiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that ahierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen andtent-makers of the New Testament. 

Pope Night--the anniversary of the discovery of the Papal incendiary GuyFawkes, booted and spurred, ready to touch fire to his powder-train underthe Parliament House--was celebrated by the early settlers of NewEngland, and doubtless afforded a good deal of relief to the youngerplants of grace in the Puritan vineyard. In those solemn old days, therecurrence of the powder-plot anniversary, with its processions, hideousimages of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, its liberal potations of strongwaters, and its blazing bonfires reddening the wild November hills, musthave been looked forward to with no slight degree of pleasure. For onenight, at least, the cramped and smothered fun and mischief of theyounger generation were permitted to revel in the wild extravaganceof a Roman saturnalia or the Christmas holidays of a slave plantation. Bigotry--frowning upon the May-pole, with its flower wreaths and sportiverevellers, and counting the steps of the dancers as so many steps towardsperdition--recognized in the grim farce of Guy Fawkes's anniversarysomething of its own lineaments, smiled complacently upon the riotousyoung actors, and opened its close purse to furnish tar-barrels to roastthe Pope, and strong water to moisten the throats of his noisy judges andexecutioners. 

Up to the time of the Revolution the powder plot was duly commemoratedthroughout New England. At that period the celebration of it wasdiscountenanced, and in many places prohibited, on the ground that it wasinsulting to our Catholic allies from France. In Coffin's History ofNewbury it is stated that, in 1774, the town authorities of Newburyportordered "that no effigies be carried about or exhibited only in thedaytime. " The last public celebration in that town was in the followingyear. Long before the close of the last century the exhibitions of PopeNight had entirely ceased throughout the country, with, as far as we canlearn, a solitary exception. The stranger who chances to be travellingon the road between Newburyport and Haverhill, on the night of the 5th ofNovember, may well fancy that an invasion is threatened from the sea, orthat an insurrection is going on inland; for from all the high hillsoverlooking the river tall fires are seen blazing redly against the cold, dark, autumnal sky, surrounded by groups of young men and boys busilyengaged in urging them with fresh fuel into intenser activity. To feedthese bonfires, everything combustible which could be begged or stolenfrom the neighboring villages, farm-houses, and fences is put inrequisition. Old tar-tubs, purloined from the shipbuilders of theriver-side, and flour and lard barrels from the village-traders, arestored away for days, and perhaps weeks, in the woods or in the rain-gullies of the hills, in preparation for Pope Night. From the earliestsettlement of the towns of Amesbury and Salisbury, the night of thepowder plot has been thus celebrated, with unbroken regularity, down tothe present time. The event which it once commemorated is probably nowunknown to most of the juvenile actors. The symbol lives on fromgeneration to generation after the significance is lost; and we have seenthe children of our Catholic neighbors as busy as their Protestantplaymates in collecting, "by hook or by crook, " the materials for Pope-Night bonfires. We remember, on one occasion, walking out with a giftedand learned Catholic friend to witness the fine effect of theillumination on the hills, and his hearty appreciation of its picturesqueand wild beauty, --the busy groups in the strong relief of the fires, andthe play and corruscation of the changeful lights on the bare, brownhills, naked trees, and autumn clouds. 

In addition to the bonfires on the hills, there was formerly a processionin the streets, bearing grotesque images of the Pope, his cardinals andfriars; and behind them Satan himself, a monster with huge ox-horns onhis head, and a long tail, brandishing his pitchfork and goading themonward. The Pope was generally furnished with a movable head, whichcould be turned round, thrown back, or made to bow, like that of a china-ware mandarin. An aged inhabitant of the neighborhood has furnished uswith some fragments of the songs sung on such occasions, probably thesame which our British ancestors trolled forth around their bonfires twocenturies 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, suchas regaled the senses of the Virgin Queen or Bloody Mary, which entirelyreconciles us to their disuse at the present time. 

It should be the fervent prayer of all good men that the evil spirit ofreligious hatred and intolerance, which on the one hand prompted thegunpowder plot, and which on the other has ever since made it theoccasion of reproach and persecution of an entire sect of professingChristians, may be no longer perpetuated. In the matter of exclusivenessand 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 thehymns of Cowper and the Confessions of Augustine, the humane philosophyof Channing and the devout meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the simpleessays of Woolman and the glowing periods of Bossuet, shall be regardedas 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 seventeenthcentury, was a frontier settlement, occupying an advanced position in thegreat 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 fournorthwardly was occupied by scattered settlers, while in the centre ofthe town a compact village had grown up. In the immediate vicinity therewere but few Indians, and these generally peaceful and inoffensive. Onthe breaking out of the Narragansett war, the inhabitants had erectedfortifications and taken other measures for defence; but, with thepossible 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 theyear 1689 that the safety of the settlement was seriously threatened. Three persons were killed in that year. In 1690 six garrisons wereestablished in different parts of the town, with a small company ofsoldiers attached to each. Two of these houses are still standing. Theywere built of brick, two stories high, with a single outside door, sosmall and narrow that but one person could enter at a time; the windowsfew, and only about two and a half feet long by eighteen inches withthick diamond glass secured with lead, and crossed inside with bars ofiron. The basement had but two rooms, and the chamber was entered by aladder instead of stairs; so that the inmates, if driven thither, couldcut off communication with the rooms below. Many private houses werestrengthened and fortified. We remember one familiar to our boyhood, --a venerable old building of wood, with brick between the weather boardsand ceiling, with a massive balustrade over the door, constructed of oaktimber and plank, with holes through the latter for firing uponassailants. The door opened upon a stone-paved hall, or entry, leadinginto the huge single room of the basement, which was lighted by two smallwindows, the ceiling black with the smoke of a century and a half; a hugefireplace, calculated for eight-feet wood, occupying one entire side;while, overhead, suspended from the timbers, or on shelves fastened tothem, were household stores, farming utensils, fishing-rods, guns, bunches of herbs gathered perhaps a century ago, strings of dried applesand pumpkins, links of mottled sausages, spareribs, and flitches ofbacon; the firelight of an evening dimly revealing the checked woollencoverlet of the bed in one far-off corner, while in another "the pewterplates on the dresser Caught and reflected the flame as shields of armiesthe sunshine. "

Tradition has preserved many incidents of life in the garrisons. Intimes of unusual peril the settlers generally resorted at night to thefortified houses, taking thither their flocks and herds and suchhousehold valuables as were most likely to strike the fancy or ministerto the comfort or vanity of the heathen marauders. False alarms werefrequent. The smoke of a distant fire, the bark of a dog in the deepwoods, a stump or bush taking in the uncertain light of stars and moonthe appearance of a man, were sufficient to spread alarm through theentire settlement, and to cause the armed men of the garrison to passwhole nights in sleepless watching. It is said that at Haselton'sgarrison-house the sentinel on duty saw, as he thought, an Indian insideof the paling which surrounded the building, and apparently seeking togain an entrance. He promptly raised his musket and fired at theintruder, alarming thereby the entire garrison. The women and childrenleft their beds, and the men seized their guns and commenced firing onthe suspicious object; but it seemed to bear a charmed life, and remainedunharmed. As the morning dawned, however, the mystery was solved by thediscovery of a black quilted petticoat hanging on the clothes-line, completely riddled with balls. 

As a matter of course, under circumstances of perpetual alarm andfrequent peril, the duty of cultivating their fields, and gathering theirharvests, and working at their mechanical avocations was dangerous anddifficult to the settlers. One instance will serve as an illustration. At the garrison-house of Thomas Dustin, the husband of the far-famed MaryDustin, (who, while a captive of the Indians, and maddened by the murderof her infant child, killed and scalped, with the assistance of a youngboy, the entire band of her captors, ten in number, ) the business ofbrick-making was carried on. The pits where the clay was found were onlya few rods from the house; yet no man ventured to bring the clay to theyard within the enclosure without the attendance of a file of soldiers. An anecdote relating to this garrison has been handed down to the presenttune. Among its inmates were two young cousins, Joseph and MaryWhittaker; the latter a merry, handsome girl, relieving the tedium ofgarrison 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 faircousin, who was not inclined to encourage him. Growing desperate, hethreatened one evening to throw himself into the garrison well. Histhreat only called forth the laughter of his mistress; and, bidding herfarewell, he proceeded to put it in execution. On reaching the well hestumbled over a log; whereupon, animated by a happy idea, he dropped thewood into the water instead of himself, and, hiding behind the curb, awaited the result. Mary, who had been listening at the door, and whohad not believed her lover capable of so rash an act, heard the suddenplunge of the wooden Joseph. She ran to the well, and, leaning over thecurb and peering down the dark opening, cried out, in tones of anguishand remorse, "O Joseph, if you're in the land of the living, I 'll haveyou!" "I'll take ye at your word, " answered Joseph, springing up fromhis hiding-place, and avenging himself for her coyness and coldness by ahearty embrace. 

Our own paternal ancestor, owing to religious scruples in the matter oftaking arms even for defence of life and property, refused to leave hisundefended house and enter the garrison. The Indians frequently came tohis house; and the family more than once in the night heard themwhispering under the windows, and saw them put their copper faces to theglass to take a view of the apartments. Strange as it may seen, theynever offered any injury or insult to the inmates. 

In 1695 the township was many times molested by Indians, and severalpersons were killed and wounded. Early in the fall a small party madetheir appearance in the northerly part of the town, where, finding twoboys at work in an open field, they managed to surprise and capture them, and, without committing further violence, retreated through the woods totheir homes on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Isaac Bradley, agedfifteen, was a small but active and vigorous boy; his companion incaptivity, Joseph Whittaker, was only eleven, yet quite as large in size, and heavier in his movements. After a hard and painful journey theyarrived at the lake, and were placed in an Indian family, consisting of aman and squaw and two or three children. Here they soon acquired asufficient knowledge of the Indian tongue to enable them to learn fromthe conversation carried on in their presence that it was designed totake them to Canada in the spring. This discovery was a painful one. Canada, the land of Papist priests and bloody Indians, was the especialterror of the New England settlers, and the anathema maranatha of Puritanpulpits. Thither the Indians usually hurried their captives, where theycompelled them to work in their villages or sold them to the Frenchplanters. Escape from thence through a deep wilderness, and across lakesand mountains and almost impassable rivers, without food or guide, wasregarded as an impossibility. The poor boys, terrified by the prospectof being carried still farther from their home and friends, began todream of escaping from their masters before they started for Canada. Itwas now winter; it would have been little short of madness to have chosenfor flight that season of bitter cold and deep snows. Owing to exposureand want of proper food and clothing, Isaac, the eldest of the boys, wasseized with a violent fever, from which he slowly recovered in the courseof the winter. His Indian mistress was as kind to him as hercircumstances permitted, --procuring medicinal herbs and roots for herpatient, and tenderly watching over him in the long winter nights. Spring came at length; the snows melted; and the ice was broken up on thelake. The Indians began to make preparations for journeying to Canada;and Isaac, who had during his sickness devised a plan of escape, saw thatthe time of putting it in execution had come. On the evening before hewas to make the attempt he for the first time informed his youngercompanion 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 inthe wigwam, in the midst of the family. Joseph soon fell asleep; butIsaac, fully sensible of the danger and difficulty of the enterprisebefore him, lay awake, watchful for his opportunity. About midnight herose, cautiously stepping over the sleeping forms of the family, andsecuring, as he went, his Indian master's flint, steel, and tinder, and asmall quantity of dry moose-meat and cornbread. He then carefullyawakened his companion, who, starting up, forgetful of the cause of hisdisturbance, asked aloud, "What do you want?" The savages began to stir;and Isaac, trembling with fear of detection, lay down again and pretendedto be asleep. After waiting a while he again rose, satisfied, from theheavy breathing of the Indians, that they were all sleeping; and fearingto awaken Joseph a second time, lest he should again hazard all by histhoughtlessness, he crept softly out of the wigwam. He had proceeded buta few rods when he heard footsteps behind him; and, supposing himselfpursued, he hurried into the woods, casting a glance backward. What washis joy to see his young companion running after him! They hastened onin a southerly direction as nearly as they could determine, hoping toreach their distant home. When daylight appeared they found a largehollow log, into which they crept for concealment, wisely judging thatthey would be hotly pursued by their Indian captors. 

Their sagacity was by no means at fault. The Indians, missing theirprisoners in the morning, started off in pursuit with their dogs. As theyoung boys lay in the log they could hear the whistle of the Indians andthe barking of dogs upon their track. It was a trying moment; and eventhe stout heart of the elder boy sank within him as the dogs came up tothe log and set up a loud bark of discovery. But his presence of mindsaved him. He spoke in a low tone to the dogs, who, recognizing hisfamiliar voice, wagged their tails with delight and ceased barking. Hethen 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. Theboys 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 boyslooked after them and saw them disappear in the thick woods. Theyremained in their covert until night, when they started again on theirlong journey, taking a new route to avoid the Indians. At daybreak theyagain concealed themselves, but travelled the next night and day withoutresting. By this time they had consumed all the bread which they hadtaken, and were fainting from hunger and weariness. Just at the close ofthe third day they were providentially enabled to kill a pigeon and asmall 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 theystruck upon an old Indian path, and, following it until night, camesuddenly 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 oflogs and brushwood was burning; and around it the Indians sat, eatingtheir moose-meat and smoking their pipes. 

The poor fugitives, starving, weary, and chilled by the cold springblasts, gazed down upon the ample fire; and the savory meats which thesquaws were cooking by it, but felt no temptation to purchase warmth andfood by surrendering themselves to captivity. Death in the forest seemedpreferable. They turned and fled back upon their track, expecting everymoment to hear the yells of pursuers. The morning found them seated onthe bank of a small stream, their feet torn and bleeding, and theirbodies emaciated. The elder, as a last effort, made search for roots, and fortunately discovered a few ground-nuts, (glicine apios) whichserved 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 ofwater, and that to the sea and the white settlements near it; and heresolved to follow it. They again began their painful march; the daypassed, and the night once more overtook them. When the eighth morningdawned, the younger of the boys found himself unable to rise from his bedof leaves. Isaac endeavored to encourage him, dug roots, and procuredwater for him; but the poor lad was utterly exhausted. He had no longerheart or hope. The elder boy laid him on leaves and dry grass at thefoot of a tree, and with a heavy heart bade him farewell. Alone heslowly and painfully proceeded down the stream, now greatly increased insize by tributary rivulets. On the top of a hill, he climbed withdifficulty into a tree, and saw in the distance what seemed to be aclearing and a newly raised frame building. Hopeful and rejoicing, heturned back to his young companion, told him what he had seen, and, afterchafing his limbs awhile, got him upon his feet. Sometimes supportinghim, and at others carrying him on his back, the heroic boy staggeredtowards the clearing. On reaching it he found it deserted, and wasobliged to continue his journey. Towards night signs of civilizationbegan to appear, --the heavy, continuous roar of water was heard; and, presently emerging from the forest, he saw a great river dashing in whitefoam down precipitous rocks, and on its bank the gray walls of a hugestone building, with flankers, palisades, and moat, over which theBritish flag was flying. This was the famous Saco Fort, built byGovernor 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; butIsaac 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 ofthe electric wire conveys a new subject for thought or action to ageneration as eager as the ancient Athenians for some new thing, simplelegends of the past like that which we have transcribed have undoubtedlylost in a great degree their interest. The lore of the fireside isbecoming obsolete, and with the octogenarian few who still linger amongus 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 ourattention to a matter which has been very carefully kept out of sight byorators and toast-drinkers. We allude to the participation of coloredmen in the great struggle for American freedom. It is not in accordancewith our taste or our principles to eulogize the shedders of blood evenin a cause of acknowledged justice; but when we see a whole nation doinghonor to the memories of one class of its defenders to the total neglectof another class, who had the misfortune to be of darker complexion, wecannot forego the satisfaction of inviting notice to certain historicalfacts which for the last half century have been quietly elbowed aside, as no more deserving of a place in patriotic recollection than thedescendants of the men to whom the facts in question relate have to aplace in a Fourth of July procession. 

Of the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolutionno attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record. Theyhave had no historian. With here and there an exception, they have allpassed away; and only some faint tradition of their campaigns underWashington and Greene and Lafayette, and of their cruisings under Decaturand Barry, lingers among their, descendants. Yet enough is known to showthat the free colored men of the United States bore their full proportionof the sacrifices and trials of the Revolutionary War. 

The late Governor Eustis, of Massachusetts, --the pride and boast of thedemocracy of the East, himself an active participant in the war, andtherefore a most competent witness, --Governor Morrill, of New Hampshire, Judge Hemphill, of Pennsylvania, and other members of Congress, in thedebate on the question of admitting Missouri as a slave State into theUnion, bore emphatic testimony to the efficiency and heroism of the blacktroops. Hon. Calvin Goddard, of Connecticut, states that in the littlecircle of his residence he was instrumental in securing, under the act of1818, the pensions of nineteen colored soldiers. "I cannot, " he says, "refrain from mentioning one aged black man, Primus Babcock, who proudlypresented to me an honorable discharge from service during the war, datedat the close of it, wholly in the handwriting of George Washington; norcan I forget the expression of his feelings when informed, after hisdischarge had been sent to the War Department, that it could not bereturned. At his request it was written for, as he seemed inclined tospurn the pension and reclaim the discharge. " There is a touchinganecdote related of Baron Stenben on the occasion of the disbandment ofthe American army. A black soldier, with his wounds unhealed, utterlydestitute, stood on the wharf just as a vessel bound for his distant homewas getting under way. The poor fellow gazed at the vessel with tears inhis eyes, and gave himself up to despair. The warm-hearted foreignerwitnessed his emotion, and, inquiring into the cause of it, took his lastdollar from his purse and gave it to him, with tears of sympathytrickling down his cheeks. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the poor woundedsoldier hailed the sloop and was received on board. As it moved out fromthe wharf, he cried back to his noble friend on shore, "God Almightybless you, Master Baron!"

"In Rhode Island, " says Governor Eustis in his able speech againstslavery in Missouri, 12th of twelfth month, 1820, "the blacks formed anentire 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 berecollected that four hundred men met and repulsed, after a terrible andsanguinary struggle, fifteen hundred Hessian troops, headed by CountDonop. The glory of the defence of Red Bank, which has been pronouncedone of the most heroic actions of the war, belongs in reality to blackmen; yet who now hears them spoken of in connection with it? Among thetraits which distinguished the black regiment was devotion to theirofficers. In the attack made upon the American lines near Croton Riveron the 13th of the fifth month, 1781, Colonel Greene, the commander ofthe regiment, was cut down and mortally wounded; but the sabres of theenemy only reached him through the bodies of his faithful guard ofblacks, who hovered over him to protect him, every one of whom waskilled. The late Dr. Harris, of Dunbarton, New Hampshire, aRevolutionary veteran, stated, in a speech at Francistown, New Hampshire, some years ago, that on one occasion the regiment to which he wasattached was commanded to defend an important position, which the enemythrice assailed, and from which they were as often repulsed. "Therewas, " said the venerable speaker, "a regiment of blacks in the samesituation, --a regiment of negroes fighting for our liberty andindependence, not a white man among them but the officers, --in the samedangerous and responsible position. Had they been unfaithful or givenway before the enemy, all would have been lost. Three times insuccession were they attacked with most desperate fury by well-disciplined and veteran troops; and three times did they successfullyrepel the assault, and thus preserve an army. They fought thus throughthe war. They were brave and hardy troops. "

In the debate in the New York Convention of 1821 for amending theConstitution of the State, on the question of extending the right ofsuffrage to the blacks, Dr. Clarke, the delegate from Delaware County, and other members, made honorable mention of the services of the coloredtroops in the Revolutionary army. 

The late James Forten, of Philadelphia, well known as a colored man ofwealth, intelligence, and philanthropy, enlisted in the American navyunder Captain Decatur, of the Royal Louis, was taken prisoner during hissecond cruise, and, with nineteen other colored men, confined on boardthe horrible Jersey prison-ship; All the vessels in the American serviceat that period were partly manned by blacks. The old citizens ofPhiladelphia to this day remember the fact that, when the troops of theNorth marched through the city, one or more colored companies wereattached to nearly all the regiments. 

Governor Eustis, in the speech before quoted, states that the freecolored soldiers entered the ranks with the whites. The time of thosewho were slaves was purchased of their masters, and they were induced toenter the service in consequence of a law of Congress by which, oncondition of their serving in the ranks during the war, they were madefreemen. This hope of liberty inspired them with courage to oppose theirbreasts to the Hessian bayonet at Red Bank, and enabled them to endurewith fortitude the cold and famine of Valley Forge. The anecdote of theslave of General Sullivan, of New Hampshire, is well known. When hismaster told him that they were on the point of starting for the army, tofight for liberty, he shrewdly suggested that it would be a greatsatisfaction to know that he was indeed going to fight for his liberty. Struck with the reasonableness and justice of this suggestion, GeneralSullivan at once gave him his freedom. 

The late Tristam Burgess, of Rhode Island, in a speech in Congress, firstmonth, 1828, said "At the commencement of the Revolutionary War, RhodeIsland had a number of slaves. A regiment of them were enlisted into theContinental service, and no braver men met the enemy in battle; but notone of them was permitted to be a soldier until he had first been made afreeman. "

The celebrated Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, in his speech on theMissouri question, and in defence of the slave representation of theSouth, made the following admissions:--

"They (the colored people) were in numerous instances the pioneers, andin all the laborers, of our armies. To their hands were owing thegreatest part of the fortifications raised for the protection of thecountry. Fort Moultrie gave, at an early period of the inexperienced anduntried valor of our citizens, immortality to the American arms; and inthe Northern States numerous bodies of them were enrolled, and foughtside 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 GreatBritain, and see whether the whites enjoyed a monopoly of patriotism atthat 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 thewar 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 thelast 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 ofthem were with Perry, and helped to gain the brilliant victory of LakeErie. A whole battalion of them were distinguished for their orderlyappearance. "

Dr. Clarke, in the convention which revised the Constitution of New Yorkin 1821, speaking of the colored inhabitants of the State, said:--

"In your late war they contributed largely towards some of your mostsplendid victories. On Lakes Erie and Champlain, where your fleetstriumphed over a foe superior in numbers and engines of death, they weremanned 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 thebranches of your government, authorizing the governor to accept theservices of a corps of two thousand free people of color. Sir, thesewere times which tried men's souls. In these times it was no sportingmatter to bear arms. These were times when a man who shouldered hismusket did not know but he bared his bosom to receive a death-wound fromthe enemy ere he laid it aside; and in these times these people werefound 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 hadplaced them beyond your compulsory power. But there was no necessity forits exercise; they were volunteers, --yes, sir, volunteers to defend thatvery country from the inroads and ravages of a ruthless and vindictivefoe which had treated them with insult, degradation, and slavery. "

On the capture of Washington by the British forces, it was judgedexpedient to fortify, without delay, the principal towns and citiesexposed to similar attacks. The Vigilance Committee of Philadelphiawaited upon three of the principal colored citizens, namely, JamesForten, Bishop Allen, and Absalom Jones, soliciting the aid of the peopleof color in erecting suitable defences for the city. Accordingly, twenty-five hundred colored then assembled in the State-House yard, andfrom thence marched to Gray's Ferry, where they labored for two daysalmost without intermission. Their labors were so faithful and efficientthat a vote of thanks was tendered them by the committee. A battalion ofcolored troops was at the same time organized in the city under anofficer of the United States army; and they were on the point of marchingto the frontier when peace was proclaimed. 

General Jackson's proclamations to the free colored inhabitants ofLouisiana 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 inestimableblessings. As Americans, your country looks with confidence to heradopted children for a valorous support. As fathers, husbands, andbrothers, you are summoned to rally round the standard of the eagle, todefend all which is dear in existence. "

The second proclamation is one of the highest compliments ever paid by amilitary 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 youpossessed qualities most formidable to an invading enemy. I knew withwhat fortitude you could endure hunger, and thirst, and all the fatiguesof a campaign. I knew well how you loved your native country, and thatyou, as well as ourselves, had to defend what man holds most dear, --hisparents, wife, children, and property. You have done more than Iexpected. In addition to the previous qualities I before knew you topossess, I found among you a noble enthusiasm, which leads to theperformance of great things. 

"Soldiers! the President of the United States shall hear how praiseworthywas your conduct in the hour of danger, and the Representatives of theAmerican 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 theRevolution" and the volunteers in "the second war for independence" is tobe divided between the white and the colored man. We have dwelt uponthis subject at length, not because it accords with our principles orfeelings, for it is scarcely necessary for us to say that we are one ofthose who hold that

 "Peace hath her victories No less renowned than war, "

and certainly far more desirable and useful; but because, in popularestimation, the patriotism which dares and does on the battle-field takesa higher place than the quiet exercise of the duties of peacefulcitizenship; and we are willing that colored soldiers, with theirdescendants, should have the benefit, if possible, of a public sentimentwhich has so extravagantly lauded their white companions in arms. Ifpulpits must be desecrated by eulogies of the patriotism of bloodshed, wesee no reason why black defenders of their country in the war for libertyshould not receive honorable mention as well as white invaders of aneighboring republic who have volunteered in a war for plunder andslavery extension. For the latter class of "heroes" we have very littlerespect. The patriotism of too many of them forcibly reminds us of Dr. Johnson's definition of that much-abused term "Patriotism, sir! 'T isthe last refuge of a scoundrel. "

"What right, I demand, " said an American orator some years ago, "have thechildren of Africa to a homestead in the white man's country?" Theanswer will in part be found in the facts which we have presented. Theirright, like that of their white fellow-citizens, dates back to the dreadarbitrament of battle. Their bones whiten every stricken field of theRevolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toilbuilt up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famineand nakedness of Valley Forge and the pestilential horrors of the oldJersey prisonship. Have they, then, no claim to an equal participationin the blessings which have grown out of the national independence forwhich they fought? Is it just, is it magnanimous, is it safe, even, tostarve the patriotism of such a people, to cast their hearts out of thetreasury of the Republic, and to convert them, by politicaldisfranchisement 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 bygeographical boundaries. Flashing hope into the dark places of theearth, far down among the poor and long oppressed, or startling theoppressor in his guarded chambers like that mountain of fire which fellinto the sea at the sound of the apocalyptic trumpet, it agitated theworld. 

The arguments of Condorcet, the battle-words of Mirabeau, the fierce zealof St. Just, the iron energy of Danton, the caustic wit of CamilleDesmoulins, and the sweet eloquence of Vergniaud found echoes in alllands, and nowhere more readily than in Great Britain, the ancient foeand rival of France. The celebrated Dr. Price, of London, and the stillmore distinguished Priestley, of Birmingham, spoke out boldly in defenceof 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 thepurpose of disseminating liberal appeals and arguments throughout theUnited Kingdom. 

In Scotland an auxiliary society was formed, under the name of Friends ofthe People. Thomas Muir, young in years, yet an elder in the Scottishkirk, a successful advocate at the bar, talented, affable, eloquent, anddistinguished for the purity of his life and his enthusiasm in the causeof freedom, was its principal originator. In the twelfth month of 1792 aconvention of reformers was held at Edinburgh. The government becamealarmed, and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Muir. He escaped toFrance; but soon after, venturing to return to his native land, wasrecognized and imprisoned. He was tried upon the charge of lending booksof republican tendency, and reading an address from Theobald Wolfe Toneand the United Irishmen before the society of which he was a member. Hedefended himself in a long and eloquent address, which concluded in thefollowing manly strain:--

"What, then, has been my crime? Not the lending to a relation a copy ofThomas Paine's works, --not the giving away to another a few numbers of aninnocent and constitutional publication; but my crime is, for havingdared to be, according to the measure of my feeble abilities, a strenuousand an active advocate for an equal representation of the people in theHouse of the people, --for having dared to accomplish a measure by legalmeans which was to diminish the weight of their taxes and to put an endto the profusion of their blood. Gentlemen, from my infancy to thismoment I have devoted myself to the cause of the people. It is a goodcause: it will ultimately prevail, --it will finally triumph. "

He was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and was removed tothe Edinburgh jail, from thence to the hulks, and lastly to thetransport-ship, containing eighty-three convicts, which conveyed him toBotany Bay. 

The next victim was Palmer, a learned and highly accomplished Unitarianminister in Dundee. He was greatly beloved and respected as a polishedgentleman and sincere friend of the people. He was charged withcirculating a republican tract, and was sentenced to seven years'transportation. 

But the Friends of the People were not quelled by this summary punishmentof two of their devoted leaders. In the tenth month, 1793, delegateswere called together from various towns in Scotland, as well as fromBirmingham, Sheffield, and other places in England. Gerrald and Margarotwere sent up by the London society. After a brief sitting, theconvention was dispersed by the public authorities. Its sessions wereopened and closed with prayer, and the speeches of its members manifestedthe pious enthusiasm of the old Cameronians and Parliament-men of thetimes of Cromwell. Many of the dissenting clergy were present. WilliamSkirving, the most determined of the band, had been educated for theministry, and was a sincerely religious man. Joseph Gerrald was a youngman of brilliant talents and exemplary character. When the sheriffentered the hall to disperse the friends of liberty, Gerrald knelt inprayer. 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 thescaffold, just before his execution. It is the prayer of universalhumanity, which God will yet hear and answer. 

"O thou Governor of the universe, we rejoice that, at all times and inall circumstances, we have liberty to approach Thy throne, and that weare assured that no sacrifice is more acceptable to Thee than that whichis made for the relief of the oppressed. In this moment of trial andpersecution 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 ourfathers of old, to enlighten and direct us; and to our enemies a pillarof cloud, and darkness, and confusion. 

"Thou art Thyself the great Patron of liberty. Thy service is perfectfreedom. Prosper, we beseech Thee, every endeavor which we make topromote Thy cause; for we consider the cause of truth, or every causewhich tends to promote the happiness of Thy creatures, as Thy cause. 

"O thou merciful Father of mankind, enable us, for Thy name's sake, toendure persecution with fortitude; and may we believe that all trials andtribulations of life which we endure shall work together for good to themthat love Thee; and grant that the greater the evil, and the longer itmay be continued, the greater good, in Thy holy and adorable providence, may be produced therefrom. And this we beg, not for our own merits, butthrough the merits of Him who is hereafter to judge the world inrighteousness and mercy. "

He ceased, and the sheriff, who had been temporarily overawed by theextraordinary scene, enforced the warrant, and the meeting was broken up. The delegates descended to the street in silence, --Arthur's Seat andSalisbury Crags glooming in the distance and night, --an immense andagitated multitude waiting around, over which tossed the flaringflambeaux 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 triedin the first month, 1794, and sentenced, as Muir and Palmer hadpreviously been, to transportation. Their conduct throughout was worthyof their great and holy cause. Gerrald's defence was that of freedomrather than his own. Forgetting himself, he spoke out manfully andearnestly for the poor, the oppressed, the overtaxed, and starvingmillions of his countrymen. That some idea may be formed of this nobleplea for liberty, I give an extract from the concluding paragraphs:--

"True religion, like all free governments, appeals to the understandingfor its support, and not to the sword. All systems, whether civil ormoral, can only be durable in proportion as they are founded on truth andcalculated to promote the good of mankind. This will account to us whygovernments suited to the great energies of man have always outlived theperishable things which despotism has erected. Yes, this will account tous why the stream of Time, which is continually washing away thedissoluble fabrics of superstitions and impostures, passes without injuryby the adamant of Christianity. 

"Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history ofthe human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have alwayspreceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be acceleratedby the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented, the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by institutingrigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs andconciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be calledin to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of theirproceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence tothe nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, andbecome the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever maybecome of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish;but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from everyquarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempestand strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil. 

"Gentlemen, I am in your hands. About my life I feel not the slightestanxiety: if it would promote the cause, I would cheerfully make thesacrifice; for if I perish on an occasion like the present, out of myashes will arise a flame to consume the tyrants and oppressors of mycountry. "

Years have passed, and the generation which knew the persecuted reformershas given place to another. And now, half a century after WilliamSkirving, as he rose to receive his sentence, declared to his judges, "You may condemn us as felons, but your sentence shall yet be reversed bythe people, " the names of these men are once more familiar to Britishlips. The sentence has been reversed; the prophecy of Skirving hasbecome history. On the 21st of the eighth month, 1853, the corner-stoneof a monument to the memory of the Scottish martyrs--for whichsubscriptions had been received from such men as Lord Holland, the Dukesof Bedford and Norfolk; and the Earls of Essex and Leicester--was laidwith imposing ceremonies in the beautiful burial-place of Calton Hill, Edinburgh, by the veteran reformer and tribune of the people, JosephHume, M. P. After delivering an appropriate address, the aged radicalclosed the impressive scene by reading the prayer of Joseph Gerrald. Atthe banquet which afterwards took place, and which was presided over byJohn Dunlop, Esq. , addresses were made by the president and Dr. Ritchie, and by William Skirving, of Kirkaldy, son of the martyr. The CompleteSuffrage Association of Edinburgh, to the number of five hundred, walkedin procession to Calton Hill, and in the open air proclaimed unmolestedthe very principles for which the martyrs of the past century hadsuffered. 

The account of this tribute to the memory of departed worth cannot failto awaken in generous hearts emotions of gratitude towards Him who hasthus signally vindicated His truth, showing that the triumph of theoppressor is but for a season, and that even in this world a lie cannotlive 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 itcannot solace those brave hearts which, slowly broken by the long agonyof colonial servitude, are now cold in strange graves? It is, indeed, astriking illustration of the truth that he who would benefit his fellow-man must "walk by faith, " sowing his seed in the morning, and in theevening withholding not his hand; knowing only this, that in God's goodtime the harvest shall spring up and ripen, if not for himself, yet forothers, who, as they bind the full sheaves and gather in the heavyclusters, may perchance remember him with gratitude and set up stones ofmemorial on the fields of his toil and sacrifices. We may regret that inthis stage of the spirit's life the sincere and self-denying worker isnot always permitted to partake of the fruits of his toil or receive thehonors of a benefactor. We hear his good evil spoken of, and his noblestsacrifices counted as naught; we see him not only assailed by the wicked, but discountenanced and shunned by the timidly good, followed on his hotand dusty pathway by the execrations of the hounding mob and thecontemptuous pity of the worldly wise and prudent; and when at last thehorizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the placeswhich have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to saywith 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 heartwherein he hath labored under the sun?" But is this the end? Has God'suniverse no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts inour nestling-place? Has life's infancy only been provided for, andbeyond this poor nursery-chamber of Time is there no playground for thesoul's youth, no broad fields for its manhood? Perchance, could we butlift the curtains of the narrow pinfold wherein we dwell, we might seethat our poor friend and brother whose fate we have thus deplored has byno means lost the reward of his labors, but that in new fields of duty heis cheered even by the tardy recognition of the value of his services inthe old. The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onwardand is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the samewaters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made gladby 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 ofTime. Who shall say that the mournful and repentant love with which thebenefactors of our race are at length regarded may not be to them, intheir new condition of being, sweet and grateful as the perfume of long-forgotten flowers, or that our harvest-hymns of rejoicing may not reachthe ears of those who in weakness and suffering scattered the seeds ofblessing?

The history of the Edinburgh reformers is no new one; it is that of allwho seek to benefit their age by rebuking its popular crimes and exposingits cherished errors. The truths which they told were not believed, andfor that very reason were the more needed; for it is evermore the casethat 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 wrongand insolent oppression, is rashly inclined to throw himself at once intothat great conflict which the Persian seer not untruly represented as awar between light and darkness--would do well to count the cost in theoutset. If he can live for Truth alone, and, cut off from the generalsympathy, regard her service as its "own exceeding great reward;" if hecan bear to be counted a fanatic and crazy visionary; if, in all goodnature, he is ready to receive from the very objects of his solicitudeabuse and obloquy in return for disinterested and self-sacrificingefforts for their welfare; if, with his purest motives misunderstood andhis best actions perverted and distorted into crimes, he can still holdon his way and patiently abide the hour when "the whirligig of Time shallbring about its revenges;" if, on the whole, he is prepared to be lookedupon as a sort of moral outlaw or social heretic, under good society'sinterdict of food and fire; and if he is well assured that he can, through all this, preserve his cheerfulness and faith in man, --let himgird up his loins and go forward in God's name. He is fitted for hisvocation; he has watched all night by his armor. Whatever his trial maybe, he is prepared; he may even be happily disappointed in respect to it;flowers of unexpected refreshing may overhang the hedges of his straitand narrow way; but it remains to be true that he who serves hiscontemporaries in faithfulness and sincerity must expect no wages fromtheir gratitude; for, as has been well said, there is, after all, but oneway of doing the world good, and unhappily that way the world does notlike; for it consists in telling it the very thing which it does not wishto hear. 

Unhappily, in the case of the reformer, his most dangerous foes are thoseof his own household. True, the world's garden has become a desert andneeds renovation; but is his own little nook weedless? Sin aboundswithout; but is his own heart pure? While smiting down the giants anddragons which beset the outward world, are there no evil guests sittingby his own hearth-stone? Ambition, envy, self-righteousness, impatience, dogmatism, and pride of opinion stand at his door-way ready to enterwhenever he leaves it unguarded. Then, too, there is no small danger offailing to discriminate between a rational philanthropy, with itsadaptation of means to ends, and that spiritual knight-errantry whichundertakes the championship of every novel project of reform, scouringthe world in search of distressed schemes held in durance by common senseand vagaries happily spellbound by ridicule. He must learn that, although the most needful truth may be unpopular, it does not follow thatunpopularity is a proof of the truth of his doctrines or the expediencyof his measures. He must have the liberality to admit that it is barelypossible for the public on some points to be right and himself wrong, andthat the blessing invoked upon those who suffer for righteousness is notavailable to such as court persecution and invite contempt; for folly hasits martyrs as well as wisdom; and he who has nothing better to show ofhimself than the scars and bruises which the popular foot has left uponhim is not even sure of winning the honors of martyrdom as somecompensation for the loss of dignity and self-respect involved in theexhibition of its pains. To the reformer, in an especial manner, comeshome the truth that whoso ruleth his own spirit is greater than he whotaketh a city. Patience, hope, charity, watchfulness unto prayer, --howneedful are all these to his success! Without them he is in danger ofingloriously giving up his contest with error and prejudice at the firstrepulse; or, with that spiteful philanthropy which we sometimes witness, taking a sick world by the nose, like a spoiled child, and endeavoring toforce down its throat the long-rejected nostrums prepared for its relief. 

What then? Shall we, in view of these things, call back young, generousspirits just entering upon the perilous pathway? God forbid! Welcome, thrice welcome, rather. Let them go forward, not unwarned of the dangersnor unreminded of the pleasures which belong to the service of humanity. Great is the consciousness of right. Sweet is the answer of a goodconscience. He who pays his whole-hearted homage to truth and duty, whoswears his lifelong fealty on their altars, and rises up a Nazariteconsecrated to their holy service, is not without his solace andenjoyment when, to the eyes of others, he seems the most lonely andmiserable. He breathes an atmosphere which the multitude know not of;"a serene heaven which they cannot discern rests over him, glorious inits purity and stillness. " Nor is he altogether without kindly humansympathies. All generous and earnest hearts which are brought in contactwith his own beat evenly with it. All that is good, and truthful, andlovely in man, whenever and wherever it truly recognizes him, must sooneror later acknowledge his claim to love and reverence. His faithovercomes all things. The future unrolls itself before him, with itswaving harvest-fields springing up from the seed he is scattering; and helooks forward to the close of life with the calm confidence of one whofeels that he has not lived idle and useless, but with hopeful heart andstrong arm has labored with God and Nature for the best. 

And not in vain. In the economy of God, no effort, however small, putforth for the right cause, fails of its effect. No voice, howeverfeeble, lifted up for truth, ever dies amidst the confused noises oftime. Through discords of sin and sorrow, pain and wrong, it rises adeathless melody, whose notes of wailing are hereafter to be changed tothose of triumph as they blend with the great harmony of a reconcileduniverse. The language of a transatlantic reformer to his friends isthen as true as it is hopeful and cheering: "Triumph is certain. We haveespoused no losing cause. In the body we may not join our shout with thevictors; but in spirit we may even now. There is but an interval of timebetween us and the success at which we aim. In all other respects thelinks of the chain are complete. Identifying ourselves with immortal andimmutable principles, we share both their immortality and immutability. The vow which unites us with truth makes futurity present with us. Ourbeing resolves itself into an everlasting now. It is not so correct tosay that we shall be victorious as that we are so. When we will inunison with the supreme Mind, the characteristics of His will become, insome sort, those of ours. What He has willed is virtually done. It maytake ages to unfold itself; but the germ of its whole history is wrappedup in His determination. When we make His will ours, which we do when weaim 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 itsbeing. Ours, therefore, is a perpetual triumph. Our deeds are, all ofthem, 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 landingof the Pilgrims at Plymouth, December 22, 1870. 

No one can appreciate more highly than myself the noble qualities of themen and women of the Mayflower. It is not of them that I, a descendantof the "sect called Quakers, " have reason to complain in the matter ofpersecution. A generation which came after them, with less piety andmore bigotry, is especially responsible for the little unpleasantnessreferred to; and the sufferers from it scarcely need any presentchampionship. They certainly did not wait altogether for the revenges ofposterity. If they lost their ears, it is satisfactory to remember thatthey made those of their mutilators tingle with a rhetoric more sharpthan polite. 

A worthy New England deacon once described a brother in the church as avery good man Godward, but rather hard man-ward. It cannot be deniedthat some very satisfactory steps have been taken in the latterdirection, at least, since the days of the Pilgrims. Our age is tolerantof creed and dogma, broader in its sympathies, more keenly sensitive totemporal 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 degradationto equality with man before the law. Our criminal codes no longer embodythe maxim of barbarism, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, " buthave regard not only for the safety of the community, but to the reformand well-being of the criminal. All the more, however, for this amiabletenderness do we need the counterpoise of a strong sense of justice. With our sympathy for the wrong-doer we need the old Puritan and Quakerhatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions arighteous abhorrence of sin. All the more for the sweet humanities andChristian liberalism which, in drawing men nearer to each other, areincreasing the sum of social influences for good or evil, we need thebracing atmosphere, healthful, if austere, of the old moralities. Individual and social duties are quite as imperative now as when theywere minutely specified in statute-books and enforced by penalties nolonger admissible. It is well that stocks, whipping-post, and ducking-stool are now only matters of tradition; but the honest reprobation ofvice 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 excellenceof constitution and laws can avail much if the people lack purity andintegrity. Culture, art, refinement, care for our own comfort and thatof others, are all well, but truth, honor, reverence, and fidelity toduty are indispensable. 

The Pilgrims were right in affirming the paramount authority of the lawof God. If they erred in seeking that authoritative law, and passed overthe Sermon on the Mount for the stern Hebraisms of Moses; if theyhesitated in view of the largeness of Christian liberty; if they seemedunwilling to accept the sweetness and light of the good tidings, let usnot forget that it was the mistake of men who feared more than they daredto hope, whose estimate of the exceeding awfulness of sin caused them todwell upon God's vengeance rather than his compassion; and whose dread ofevil was so great that, in shutting their hearts against it, theysometimes shut out the good. It is well for us if we have learned tolisten to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes; but there are crises inall lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" or theDecalogue which the founders wrote on the gate-posts of theircommonwealth. 

Let us then be thankful for the assurances which the last few years haveafforded 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 couldshake, in heroic self-sacrifice, in entire consecration to duty. Thefathers have lived in their sons. Have we not all known the Winthropsand Brewsters, the Saltonstalls and Sewalls, of old times, ingubernatorial chairs, in legislative halls, around winter camp-fires, inthe slow martyrdoms of prison and hospital? The great struggle throughwhich we have passed has taught us how much we owe to the men and womenof the Plymouth Colony, --the noblest ancestry that ever a people lookedback to with love and reverence. Honor, then, to the Pilgrims! Let theirmemory be green forever!

GOVERNOR ENDICOTT. 

I am sorry that I cannot respond in person to the invitation of the EssexInstitute to its commemorative festival on the 18th. I especially regretit, because, though a member of the Society of Friends, and, as such, regarding with abhorrence the severe persecution of the sect under theadministration of Governor Endicott, I am not unmindful of the otherwisenoble qualities and worthy record of the great Puritan, whose misfortuneit 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 honestlythought that every convert to Quakerism became by virtue of thatconversion a child of perdition; and, as the head of the Commonwealth, responsible for the spiritual as well as temporal welfare of itsinhabitants, he felt it his duty to whip, banish, and hang heretics tosave his people from perilous heresy. 

The extravagance of some of the early Quakers has been grosslyexaggerated. Their conduct will compare in this respect favorably withthat of the first Anabaptists and Independents; but it must be admittedthat many of them manifested a good deal of that wild enthusiasm whichhas always been the result of persecution and the denial of the rights ofconscience and worship. Their pertinacious defiance of laws enactedagainst them, and their fierce denunciations of priests and magistrates, must have been particularly aggravating to a man as proud and hightempered as John Endicott. He had that free-tongued neighbor of his, Edward Wharton, smartly whipped at the cart-tail about once a month, butit may be questioned whether the governor's ears did not suffer as muchunder Wharton's biting sarcasm and "free speech" as the latter's back didfrom the magisterial whip. 

Time has proved that the Quakers had the best of the controversy; andtheir descendants can well afford to forget and forgive an error whichthe 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 issuggested that I may furnish a poem for the occasion of its meeting atThe Willows on the 22d. I would be glad to make the implied probabilitya 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 EssexCounty, who adds to her modern culture and rare poetical gifts the bestspirit of her Puritan ancestry, has lent the interest of her verse to theoccasion. 

It was a happy thought of the Institute to select for its first meetingof the season the day and the place of the landing of the great and goodgovernor, and permit me to say, as thy father's old friend, that itschoice for orator, of the son of him whose genius, statesmanship, andeloquence honored the place of his birth, has been equally happy. As Ilook over the list of the excellent worthies of the first emigrations, Ifind no one who, in all respects, occupies a nobler place in the earlycolonial history of Massachusetts than John Winthrop. Like Vane andMilton, he was a gentleman as well as a Puritan, a cultured andenlightened statesman as well as a God-fearing Christian. It was notunder his long and wise chief magistracy that religious bigotry andintolerance hung and tortured their victims, and the terrible delusion ofwitchcraft darkened the sun at noonday over Essex. If he had not quitereached 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 charityand forbearance far in advance of his generation. 

I am sorry that I must miss an occasion of so much interest. I hope youwill not lack the presence of the distinguished citizen who inherits thebest qualities of his honored ancestor, and who, as a statesman, scholar, and patriot, has added new lustre to the name of Winthrop. 

DANVERS, 6th Month, 19, 1880.