body is friendly to me, and you and Susan are worth a mint of money to me. For all what I said about the land, I really think I have got my full share.”

"We can all have our share in the beauties of God's earth without owning, as you say, a foot of it," rejoined Charlotte. "We must feel it is our Father's. I am sure the richest man in the world cannot take more pleasure in looking at a beautiful prospect than I do, or in breathing this sweet, sweet air. It seems to me, father, as if every thing I look upon was ready to burst forth in a hymn of praise; and there is enough in my heart to make verses of, if I only knew how."

"That's the mystery, Lottie, how they do it: I can make one line, but I can never get a fellow to it."

Well, father, as Susy would say, it's a comfort to have the feeling, though you can't express it."

66 warm

Charlotte was right. It is a great comfort and happiness to have the feeling; and happy would it be if those who live in the country were more sensible to the beauties of nature: if they could see something in the glorious forest besides "good wood and timber lots," something in the green valley besides a soil," something in a waterfall besides a "mill-privilege." There is a susceptibility in every human heart to the ever-present and abounding beauties of nature; and whose fault is it that this taste is not awakened and directed? If the poet and the painter cannot bring down their arts to the level of the poor, are there none to be God's interpreters to them, to teach them to read the great book of nature?

The laboring classes ought not to lose the pleasures that in the country are before them from dawn to twilight,-pleasures that might counterbalance, and often do, the profits of the merchant, pent in his city counting-house, and all the honors the lawyer earns between the court-rooms and his office. We only wish that more was made of the privilege of country life; that the farmer's wife would steal some moments from her cares to point out to her children the beauties of nature, whether amid the hills and valleys of our inland country, or on the sublime shores of the ocean. Over the city, too, hangs the vault of heaven," thick inlaid" with the witnesses of God's power and goodness his altars are everywhere.

The rich man who "lives at home at ease," and goes irritated and fretting through the country because he misses at the taverns the luxuries of his own house,-who finds the tea bad and coffee worse, the food ill cooked and table ill served, no mattresses, no silver forks, who is obliged to endure the vulgarity of a common parlor, and, in spite of the inward chafing, give a civil answer to

whatever questions may be put to him,-cannot conceive of the luxuries our travellers enjoyed at the simplest inn.

Uncle Phil found out the little histories of all the wayfarers he met, and frankly told his own. Charlotte's pale, sweet face attracted general sympathy. Country people have time for little by-the-way kindnesses; and the landlady, and her daughters, and her domestics, inquired into Charlotte's malady, suggested remedies, and described similar cases.

JOHN GORHAM PALFREY.

JOHN GORHAM PALFREY, LL.D., the son of a Boston merchant, was born in that city on the 2d of May, 1796. He was fitted for college at Exeter Academy, graduated at Harvard in 1815, studied theology, and in 1818 was ordained over the Brattle Street Church, Boston, where he continued till 1831, when he was appointed Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature in Harvard University. From January, 1836, to October, 1842, he was the editor of the "North American Review." From 1839 to 1842, he delivered courses of lectures before the Lowell Institute, on the Evidences of Christianity, which were afterwards published in two volumes, octavo. He has also published four volumes of Lectures on the Hebrew Scriptures, and a volume of Sermons, entitled Duties of Private Life.

Many of the literary, historical, and political discourses which he has from time to time delivered, before the city authorities of Boston on the 4th of July, the Massachusetts Historical Society, &c. &c., have been published. To Sparks's "American Biography" he has contributed one life,-that of his ancestor, William Palfrey.

In later years Mr. Palfrey has been much in public life, both in the Legislature of his own State and in the Congress of the United States, in which positions he gave ample evidence of his earnest and hearty sympathies for freedom. In 1846, he published in the "Boston Whig" a series of Papers on the Slave Power, which were collected in a pamphlet, and widely circulated.1

For a number of years Dr. Palfrey has been laboriously engaged upon A History of New England, of which the first volume appeared early in December, 1858, and of which it is praise enough to say that it comes up fully to the high expectations that were entertained of it. Evincing a noble and hearty appreciation of the early settlers of New England, guided by cool, impartial reason, and exhibiting throughout extensive research and a careful collation of facts, he has given us a work which will doubtless supersede all others upon the same subjeet, and be the established or classical history of that portion of our country.

"Vigorously and acutely written, embodying a great mass of facts and reasonings, some of which will be new to many readers, and all of which deserve the careful consideration of every friend of his country or of humanity."-. Christian Examiner, March, 1847.

THE ELEGANT CULTURE AND LEARNING OF THE PURITANS.

Whatever may have taken place later, the Puritanism of the first forty years of the seventeenth century was not tainted with degrading or ungraceful associations of any sort. The rank, the wealth, the chivalry, the genius, the learning, the accomplishments, the social refinements and elegance of the time, were largely represented in its ranks. Not to speak of Scotland, where soon Puritanism had few opponents in the class of the high-born and the educated, the severity of Elizabeth scarcely restrained, in her latter days, its predominance among the most exalted orders of her subjects. The Earls of Leicester, Bedford, Huntingdon, and Warwick, Sir Nicholas Bacon, his greater son, Walsingham, Burleigh, Mildmay, Sadler, Knollys, were specimens of a host of eminent men more or less friendly to or tolerant of it. Throughout the reign of James the First, it controlled the House of Commons, composed chiefly of the landed gentry of the kingdom; and if it had less sway among the Peers, this was partly because the number of lay nobles did not largely exceed that of the Bishops, who were mostly creatures of the crown. The aggregate property of that Puritan House of Commons, whose dissolution has been just now related, was computed to be three times as great as that of the Lords. The statesmen of the first period of that Parliament, which by-and-by dethroned Charles the First, had been bred in the luxury of the landed aristocracy of the realm; while of the nobility, Manchester, Essex, Warwick, Brooke, Fairfax, and others, and of the gentry, a long roll of men of the scarcely inferior position of Hampden and Waller, commanded and officered its armies and fleets. A Puritan was the first Protestant founder of a college at an English University. Among the clergy, representing mainly the scholarship of the country, nothing is more incontrovertible than that the permanent ascendency of Puritanism was only prevented by the severities of the governments of Elizabeth and her Scottish kinsmen under the several administrations of Parker, Whitgift, Bancroft, and Laud.

It may be easily believed that none of the guests whom the Earl of Leicester placed at his table by the side of his nephew, Sir Philip Sydney, were clowns. But the supposition of any necessary connection between Puritanism and what is harsh and rude in taste and manners will not even stand the test of an observation of the character of men who figured in its ranks, when the lines came to be most distinctly drawn. The Par

1 Hume, chap. li.

liamentary general, Devereux, Earl of Essex, was no strait-laced gospeller, but a man formed with every grace of person, mind, and culture, to be the ornament of a splendid court, the model knight-the idol, as long as he was the comrade, of the royal soldiery-the Bayard of the time. The position of Manchester and Fairfax, of Hollis, Fiennes, and Pierrepont, was by birthright in the most polished circle of English society. In the memoirs of the young regicide, Colonel Hutchinson, recorded by his beautiful and gentle wife, we may look at the interior of a Puritan household, and see its graces, divine and human, as they shone with a naturally blended lustre in the most strenuous and most afflicted times. The renown of English learning owes something to the sect which enrolled the names of Selden, Lightfoot, Gale, and Owen. Its seriousness and depth of thought had lent their inspiration to the delicate muse of Spenser. Judging between their colleague preachers, Travers and Hooker, the critical Templars awarded the palm of scholarly eloquence to the Puritan. When the Puritan lawyer Whitelock was ambassador to Queen Christina, he kept a magnificent state, which was the admiration of her court, perplexed as they were by his persistent Puritanical testimony against the practice of drinking healths. For his Latin Secretary, the Puritan Protector employed a man at once equal to the foremost of mankind in genius and learning, and skilled in all manly exercises, proficient in the lighter accomplishments beyond any other Englishman of his day, and caressed in his youth, in France and Italy, for eminence in the studies of their fastidious scholars and artists. The king's camp and court at Oxford had not a better swordsman or amateur musician than John Milton, and his portraits exhibit him with locks as flowing as Prince Rupert's. In such trifles as the fashion of apparel, the usage of the best modern society vindicates, in characteristic particulars, the Roundhead judgment and taste of the century before the last. The English gentleman now, as the Puritan gentleman then, dresses plainly in "sad" colors, and puts his lace and embroidery on his servants.

1 Colonel Hutchinson could dance admirably well, had skill in fencing, played masterly on the viol, shot excellently in bows and guns, and had great judgment in paintings, graving, sculpture, and all liberal arts.

2 The learned Owen, the author of An Exposition on the Epistle to the Hebrews, 4 vols. folio, and numerous other theological works, and who was said "to carry within his broad forehead the concentrated extract of a thousand folios," was said to be very exact and nice in his personal appearance.

3 For the rival preaching of these divines, see, under Hooker, Compendium of English Literature, page 105.

38*

ROGER WILLIAMS.

There was no question upon dogmas between Williams and those who dismissed him. The sound and generous principle of a perfect freedom of the conscience in religious concerns can therefore scarcely be shown to have been involved in this dispute. At a later period he was prone to capricious changes of religious opinion. But as yet there was no development of this kind. As long as he was in Massachusetts, he was no heretic, tried by the standard of the time and the place. He was not charged with heresy. The questions which he raised, and by raising which he provoked opposition, were questions relating to political rights and to the administration of government. He had made an issue with his rulers and his neighbors upon fundamental points of their power and their property, including their power of self-protection against the tyranny from which they had lately escaped. Unintentionally, but effectually, he had set himself to play into the hands of the king and the archbishop; and it was not to be thought of by the sagacious patriots of Massachusetts, that, in the great work which they had in hand, they should suffer themselves to be defeated by such random movements.

For his busy disaffection, therefore, Williams was punished; or, rather, he was disabled for the mischief it threatened, by banishment from the jurisdiction. He was punished much less severely than the dissenters from the popular will were punished throughout the North American colonies at the time of the final rupture with the mother-country. Virtually, the freemen said to him, "It is not best that you and we should live together, and we cannot agree to it. We have just put ourselves. to great loss and trouble for the sake of pursuing our own objects uninterrupted; and we must be allowed to do so. Your liberty, as you understand it, and are bent on using it, is not compatible with the security of ours. Since you cannot accommodate yourself to us, go away. The world is wide, and it is as open to you as it was just now to us. We do not wish to harm you; but there is no place for you among us." Banishment is a word of ill sound; but the banishment from one part of New England to another, to which, in the early period of their residence, the settlers condemned Williams, was a thing widely different from that banishment from luxurious Old England to desert New England to which they had just condemned themselves. There was little hardship in leaving unattractive Salem for a residence on the beautiful shore of Narragansett Bay, except as the former had a very short start in the date of its first cultivation. Williams, involuntarily separated from Massachusetts, went with his company to Providence the same year that Hooker, and Stone, and their