was born only a year later, in 1586. Richard Mather was only ten years younger, born in the year when Ben Jonson's first play is said to have been acted, when Ralegh published his "Discovery of Guiana," and Spenser the last three books of his "Faerie Queene." Roger Williams was born in 1600, the year which gave us the first quartos of "Henry IV.," "Henry V.," "The Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Merchant of Venice," and "Much Ado About Nothing." And what is thus shown true of New England is truer still of Virginia, founded half a generation earlier. Though the sovereigns to whom both northern and southern colonies owed their first allegiance were Stuarts, all the founders of these colonies were of true Elizabethan birth.

They were not, to be sure, quite the kind of Elizabethans who expressed themselves in poetry. The single work produced in America which by any stretch of language may be held a contribution to Elizabethan letters is a portion of George Sandys's translation of Ovid, said to have been made during his sojourn in Virginia between 1621 and 1624. In general, the settlers of Virginia were of the adventurous type which expresses itself far more in action than in words; while the settlers of New England were too much devoted to the affairs of another world than this to have time, even if they had had taste or principle, for devotion to any form of fine art. Of Elizabethan times, all the while, as of any period in history, it remains true that in a deep sense the men of a single generation cannot help being brethren. For all their mutual detestation, Puritans and playwrights alike possessed the spontaneity of temper, the enthusiasm of purpose, and the versatility of power which marked Elizabethan England.

Broadly speaking, all our northern colonies developed from those planted in Massachusetts, and all our southern from that planted in Virginia. Questionable though this statement may seem to those who consider merely or chiefly the legal and political aspects of history, it is socially true to an ex

traordinary degree. The type of character which planted itself first on the shores of Massachusetts Bay displayed from the beginning a marked power of assimilating whatever came within its influence. This trait, akin to that which centuries before had made the conquered English slowly but surely assimilate their Norman conquerors, the Yankees of our own day have not quite lost. An equal power of assimilation marked the less austere type of character which first planted itself on the James River. Vague and commonplace as this statement may seem, it is really important. In modern America no fact is more noteworthy than that, for all the floods of immigration which have seemed to threaten almost every political and social landmark, our native type still absorbs the foreign. The children of immigrants insensibly become natives. The irresistible power of a common language and of the common ideals which underlie it still dominates. This tendency declared itself almost from the moments when Jamestown and Plymouth were settled. North and South alike, then, may broadly be regarded as regions finally settled by native Elizabethan Englishmen, whose ardent traits proved strong enough to impress themselves on posterity and to resist the immigrant influences of other traditions than their own.

Were our study of American history general, it would be our business to consider the southern and central colonies quite as much as those of New England; but in literary history New England is so predominant that, at least for the moment, we may neglect the other portions of the country. Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were both settled by devout Calvinists, slightly different perhaps in some matter of religious discipline, certainly different at first in their theoretical relation to the ancestral Church of England, but still so much alike that it is hardly by misuse of language that both are now generally called Puritan. Both colonies were governed from the beginning by written charters, things which, except for Cromwell's Instrument of Government, remain foreign to the politi

cal experience of native Englishmen, and which, on the other hand, are pretty clearly the prototypes of those written constitutions under which the United States have grown and prospered. In both colonies, too, the ideals of dominant Puritanism prevailed from the beginning, more than half a generation before Cromwell dominated English history. In England, dominant Puritanism was transitory, breaking into the course of English constitutional history amid the convulsion of the Civil Wars, and fatally unable to maintain itself among the complexities and traditions which compose the historical continuity of the old world. In New England, on the other hand, there was no historical continuity, no tradition, no political and social complexity, to check its growth. In England the Civil Wars came; then the Commonwealth; then the Restoration. In the history of New England we can find no epoch-making facts to correspond with these. There was change of sovereignty, of course; there were heart-burnings and doubts and fears enough, and to spare; but there was no irruption of political ideals strange to the founders of our American Commonwealth, nor, was there any essential change of dominant ideals until the seventeenth century was over. What might have happened except for the Revolution of 1688, no one can say; but that revolution substantially confirmed the traditions of the New England fathers.

Throughout the seventeenth century meanwhile a fact had been developing itself on the American continent which was perhaps more significant to the future of New England than any in the history of the mother country. Before 1610 the French had finally established themselves in the regions now known as Nova Scotia, and from that time forth the French power was steadily extending itself to the northward and westward of the English colonies. The works of Francis Parkman, in which the history of the French power in America is finally dealt with, have sometimes been deemed ittle more than records of picturesque adventure and border

warfare, hardly deserving the lifelong devotion of our most powerful historian. In point of fact, however, the matters which they so vividly record are perhaps the most decisive which have yet occurred on the American continent. The French domination of Canada and of the West meant the planting and the growth there of a language, with all the moral and political ideals which language so fatally involves, utterly foreign to those English ideals which have finally come to characterise our people. It is hard to generalise rationally; but perhaps we may suggestively say that in a single word. the ideal for which the French power stood in religion and in politics alike was the ideal of authority, - of a centralised earthly power which, so far as it reached, should absolutely control human thought and conduct.

Divine authority, of course, New England always recognised; but this it found expressed not in a traditionally established hierarchy, but in the written words of an inspired Bible which all men might read for themselves. Temporal authority, too, New England recognised; but temporal authority secured and limited by written charters, nor yet so absolute that for a moment it could be suffered unopposed to violate the traditional liberties of England. In a way, then, the conflict between France and England in the New World, a conflict which came to fierce fighting only in the very last years of the seventeenth century, was really a conflict between the Civil and Canon Law and the Law of England, between vestiges of the antique empire of Rome and the beginnings of that newer empire of the English language which chiefly among modern systems now seems to promise something like Roman extension and permanence. It was not until well into the eighteenth century, however, that France and England, imperial Rome and the Common Law, came to their death-grapple in America. In the seventeenth century, or at least until the last ten years of it, there was little more warfare in New England than was caused by the inevitable

struggles of the native Indians to maintain their existence in the presence of the invading race which has long ago swept them away.

The history of seventeenth-century New England, in brief, is that of a dominant Puritanism, twenty years older than Cromwell's and surviving his by forty years more. Amid the expanding life of a still unexplored continent, Puritanism was disturbed by no such environment as impeded it in England and fatally checked it so soon. Rather, the only external fact which affected New England Puritanism at all, was one which strengthened it, the threatening growth near by of a system as foreign to every phase of English thought as it was to Puritanism itself.

From this state of affairs resulted a general state of social character which may best be understood by comparing the historical records of New England during the hundred years now in question. The earliest history of Plymouth is that of Governor Bradford, sometimes so blunderingly called the “Log of the Mayflower;'" and the earliest history of Massachusetts is that of Governor Winthrop. Winthrop, born in 1588, died in 1649; and Bradford, born in 1590, died in 1657. Both were born under Queen Elizabeth; both emigrated before English Puritanism was dominant; and neither survived to see the Restoration. The state of life and feeling which they record, then, must clearly belong to the first period of the seventeenth century, the period when mature men were still of Elizabethan birth. In 1652, three years after Winthrop died and five years before the death of Bradford, Samuel Sewall was born in England. In 1661, four years after Bradford's death, he was brought to Massachusetts, where he lived all his life, becoming Chief Justice of the Superior Court. From 1674 to 1729 he kept a diary, which has been published by the Massachusetts Historical Society. He died in 1730. Sewall's life, then, mostly passed in Massachusetts, was contemporary with the English literature between Walton's "Complete