liberal principles which he had gathered from "English experience;" no wonder, then, that groaning under the grievous imposition of the "navigation acts," under the arbitrary distribution of their lands-many of which were old, settled and improved plantations-given away without any regard to the rights of the settlers, by the careless prodigality of Charles II, to such men as Lord Culpepper, one of the most covetous in England, and Henry, Earl of Arlington, the dissolute, but accomplished father-in-law to the king's son by lady Castlemain, who, in a word, became jointly, fac-. tors of the King as joint owners of Virginia-together with the immediate pressure of a fierce war with the Susquehannas and Seneca Indians, retaliations for which the royalist, Governor Berkley, refused to sanction with his commission to Bacon; no wonder then, we say, that the people were "much infected" with the principles of this gallant planter, and of the Speaker of their assembly, Thomas Godwin, " notoriously a friend to all the rebellion and treason which distracted Virginia;" no wonder, too, that the gallant Bacon was hailed as the "darling of their hopes, the appointed defender of Virginia," when, having been elected by the Assembly, commander-in-chief, he took charge of the "grand rebellion in Virginia!" The rebels under his command, both in the field and as a leading burgess in the Assembly, having compelled the unwilling Berkley to concede many important demands for amelioration, and this grateful feature of the legislation of the Assembly having been ratified, "that better legislation was completed, according to the new style of computation, on the fourth day of July, 1676, just one hundred years to a day, before the Congress of the United States adopting the declaration which had been framed by a statesman of Virginia, who, like Bacon, was "popularly inclined," began a new era in the history of man. The eighteenth century in Virginia was the child of the seventeenth; and Bacon's rebellion, with the corresponding scenes in Maryland, Carolina, and New England, was the early harbinger of American independence and American nationality. "Pretty good," says Sam, "for my Southern vagabonds!" PART II. CHAPTER XVII. A new mystery-The rise of Luther and Protestant wars-Advent of the mystery of Jesuitism. THOUGH Sam was in himself a mystery of the New World, yet was he not the only clouded Force to which these portentous times gave birth, and which was to become alike his foe and the terror of the old world as well as the New. A mysterious Force! yes, a terrible mystery!—the mystery of spiritual annihilation!—the mystery of "walking corpses" of humanity demonized to the greater glory of God! Momentous years were those (1537 and 1620) which gave birth to the order of Jesuits and to Sam. Memorable forever will they be in the record of human_struggle. Strange that out of the mighty travail of the Protestant Revolution of the sixteenth century in Europe should have sprung these two births, the one so eventful to the death, the other to the life of hope for humanity! that to the smiting of the powerful wands of Luther and Calvin, upon the shadowy turmoil these giant foes stepped forth, the one be neath the sun of day, the other beneath the umbrage of deep night. But as we have looked upon the birth of Sam, seen something of the stormy contrasts and opposing traits which constituted the majestic elements of the formative period of his career; have, in a word, regarded his prodigious infancy at Perinde ac cadaver-The last words of the founder of the order of Jesuits. the North and at the South, in the early Puritan and Cavalier, we may now turn our eyes on the same period in the coming of his arch and most deadly enemy. The sixteenth century was, indeed, a period of ferment in the world's history! Absolutism had attained the climax of prerogative throughout the christian world. Europe was divided between three masters, Henry VIII, of England, Francis I, of France, and Charles V, of Spain, who held it in as many fields, and were fighting a triangular battle for the possession of the whole, with the aid of mercenary armies; for the feudal system, trampled in the dust, was no longer rampant to the setting up and pulling down of kings. The gold of the newly-discovered Western World of Sam had now become a puissant arbitrator in these kingly quarrels, and soon the old time chimera of the "balance of power" seemed likely to come home to roost beneath the roof-tree of Charles V, of Spain. Henry VIII, who, between the divorcing and beheading his wives, plundering the monasteries and keeping in check beneath his heel the dying throes of the "king-making" turbulence-the "Warwick" blood of his nobility-found sufficient employment at home, after the issue of the electoral Congress of Frankfort, to retire upon from this contest and leave France and Spain to fight it out. Their wars con tinued to redden the fields of Europe with but little avail. Meanwhile, as a compensation for these evils, the human mind, casting off the prejudices and ignorance of the middle ages, marches to regeneration. Italy becomes for the second time the center from whence the light of genius and learning shines forth over Europe. Leonardo da Vinci, Tiziano, Michael Angelo, are the sublime, the most divine interpreters of art. Pulci, Ariosto Poliziano, give a new and creative impulse to literature, and are the worthy descendants of Dante. Scholasticism, with its subtle argumentatious, vague reasonings, and illogical deductions, is superseded by the practical philosophy of Lorenzo and Machiavelli, and by the irresistible and eloquent logic of the virtuous but unfortunate Savonarola. Men who, for the last three centuries, had been satisfied with what had been taught and said by Aristotle and his followers-who, as the last and incontrovertible argument, had been accustomed to exclaim, ipse dixit, now |