THE one form of secular literature for which, during the entire colonial age, the writers of New England had the most authentic vocation, is history.

     All persons of devout, brooding, and introverted natures

are apt to keep records of themselves,—to have the historic feeling; for to such persons life seems so costly and venerable a thing, that they would hold the memory of it from lapsing into that grave of the past, whither life itself every moment is hurrying. The men and women who founded the sturdy little commonwealths of New England, had such natures; they reverenced themselves, they reverenced their lives, they reverenced the stupendous task to which they were giving their lives. By a law as deep as their own souls, they were, inevitably, from the first, a race of diarists, chroniclers, biographers, autobiographers, historians. And their children and their children’s children were like unto them. The historic feeling did not perish, or even abate, with the passing of the generations. It throve rather, and grew lustier, nourishing itself on a finer and broader acceptance of life, and on the sweet memory of its own heroic age.

     Our second literary period produced four considerable historians,—William Hubbard, Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, Thomas Hutchinson: the first two excelling, in popularity, all other historians of the colonial time; the last two excelling all others in specific training for the profession of history, and in the conscious accumulation of materials for historic work.¹

     Of that species of history that is devoted to the lives of individuals rather than of communities, there were many specimens produced in the colonial epoch; such, for example, as biographies of John Cotton, Richard Mather, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and of the great army of divines, heroes, and sages that abide eternally in the “Magnalia.” But it is a singular fact that, in literary quality, the biographies written in colonial New England are far inferior to its histories.

     The best example of its biographical work is “The Life and Character of the Reverend Benjamin Colman,” by his son-in-law, Ebenezer Turell, published in Boston, in 1749. Even this distinction, however, does not imply exalted merit. In its construction, the book imitates a bad model,—Samuel Mather’s “Life of Cotton Mather,”—wherein the narrative is arranged, not in the natural order of time, but in the artificial one of topics. The style of Turell’s book is superior to Samuel Mather’s, being pure and pleasant; and his admiration for his subject, while it is hearty and reverent, never betrays him into hyperboles of laudation.¹

     William Hubbard was born in England in 1621; came to New England in his childhood; and was one of that remarkable group of nine young men whom Harvard College sent forth, in 1642, as the first specimens of high culture achieved in the woods of America. By training, by strong aptitude, and by prevailing engagements, he was almost a professional man of letters. The most of his life he passed as minister of the First Church at Ipswich, Massachusetts, where his learning and eloquence won for him a commanding reputation. But his distinction points to the literary rather than to the theological side of personal greatness. Indeed, the breadth of his thought, his geniality, and his tolerance seems well-nigh to have cracked the shell of clerical propriety in which he was encased. Thomas Hutchinson² speaks of him as having “a good degree of

catholicism,” which, as that historian suggests, “was not accounted the most valuable part of his character in the age in which he lived.” He resided in his parish of Ipswich to the great age of eighty-three; and from contemporary allusions we may picture him to ourselves as a stately, affable, and accomplished gentleman, the ideal country-pastor in a highly intellectual community,—passing the most of his time in his library, and filling the long quiet spaces of his life with various culture. The eccentric London bookseller, John Dunton, who made a voyage of business to New England in 1686, has left a lively picture of Hubbard, by whom the bookseller was hospitably received on his visit to Ipswich: “The benefit of nature and the fatigue of study have equally contributed to his eminence; neither are we less obliged to both than himself, for he fully communicates of his learning to all who have the happiness to share in his converse. In a word, he is learned without ostentation and vanity, and gives all his productions . . . a delicate turn and grace.”¹ Like nearly all his clerical associates in those days, he published occasional sermons; and these, having the unusual quality of verbal elegance, did much to form his reputation as a writer of genuine literary skill.² But his most important work was done as an historian; and as such he represents a clear advance, at least in the literary quality of his labor. He had an ear for style, something of poetic feeling, a conscious purpose of art. His hand

loved to form sentences that had precision in them, a liquid flow, the lingering echo of pleasant sounds, imaginative meanings.

     In his capacity of historian, Hubbard wrote two works, considerable in size, very unequal in merit. The less valuable one is “A General History of New England from the Discovery to 1680,” left by him in manuscript, and not put into print until the present century.¹ Of this work, many pages are transferred solidly from Morton’s “New England’s Memorial;” and for the period between 1630 and 1650, the larger part of Hubbard is but a literal repetition of Winthrop. The book seems to have been done as a mere literary job.

     A more agreeable task awaits us when we come to the study of Hubbard’s “Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England,”² from the earliest white settlement to the year 1677. If, in the seventeenth century, was produced in America any prose work which, for its almost universal diffusion among the people, deserves the name of an American classic, it is this work. The author evidently wrought upon it with genuine zest. It is not without serious faults. As a whole the narrative would now seem tedious, being clogged by petty items, often wandering into digressions, lacking a continuous and culminating power. Moreover, the work has a still greater blemish; it is inaccurate. An antiquarian of our time calls the author “the careless Hubbard;”³ and one of his own contemporaries says, with some exaggeration, of the work

now before us, “the mistakes are judged to be many more than the truths in it.”¹ In spite of all this, however, as a narrative embodying the spirit of early New England heroism, it has qualities that still give to it something of the interest which it had for its original readers. In many passages the style is strong, picturesque, dramatic, enlivened by an occasional touch of sarcasm or humor; detached incidents are often told with thrilling effect. It is not impossible for us even now to understand why, during several generations, the book had an absorbing fascination for its readers in New England, to whom these Indian stories brought home again the traditions of dreadful experience and daring achievement on the part of their own kindred.

     In one thing, certainly, the book is authentic; it represents the immeasurable rage against the Indians, that had at last taken possession of the white inhabitants of New England,—their final purpose to count out those bipeds from the list of human beings, and to wipe them out from the face of the earth. Here Hubbard is the frank voice of his contemporaries. He utters words about the red men, that are rasping and fell; such as one hears still, upon the same topic, on the American frontiers. In his pages, the Indians are “treacherous villains,”² “the dross of mankind,”³ “the dregs and lees of the earth,”⁴ “faithless and ungrateful monsters,”⁵ “children of the Devil, full of all subtlety and malice,”⁶ and Philip himself is “this treacherous and perfidious caitiff.”⁷ “Subtlety, malice, and revenge seem to be as inseparable from them as if it were a part of their essence. Whatever hopes may be of their conversion to Christianity in after time, there is but little appearance of any truth in their hearts at present, where so much of the contrary is ordinarily

breathed out of their mouths.”¹ Of the fate of certain Indians taken in battle, he has this quiet and classic description: “The men . . . were turned presently into Charon’s ferry-boat, under the command of skipper Gallop, who dispatched them, a little without the harbor.”²

     Along these old pages, which almost quiver with fury against the Indians, and are strewn with words that seem to weary the vocabulary of execration and contempt, we now and then come to a portrait of some Indian who is neither brute nor caitiff, but for pride and fortitude towers into a hero, and renders credible Dryden’s conception of “the noble savage.” One day, during King Philip’s War, some white men and a few Indian allies, resting in front of their camp in the woods, caught sight, at a distance, of a stalwart Indian, of princely air, running swiftly as if from pursuit. They “guessed by the swiftness of his motion, that he fled as if an enemy.” They instantly joined in the chase; and one of them, an Indian named Catapazet, “put him so hard to it, that he cast off, first his blanket, then his silver-laced coat and belt of peag, which made Catapazet conclude it was the right bird. . . . So as they forced him to take the water, through which as he overhastingly plunged, his foot slipping upon a stone, it made him fall into the water so deep as it wetted his gun; upon which accident, he confessed soon after, that his heart and his bowels turned within him, so as he became like a rotten stick, void of strength; insomuch as one Monopoide, a Pequod, swiftest of foot, laid hold of him within thirty rod of the riverside, without his making any resistance; though he was a very proper man, of goodly stature and great courage of mind, as well as strength of body. One of the first English that came up with him was Robert Stanton, a young man that scarce had reached the twenty-second year of his age; yet adventuring to ask him a question or two, to whom this manly

sachem, looking with a little neglect upon his youthful face, reified in broken English, ‘You much child, no understand matters of war; let your brother or your chief come, him I will answer;’ and was as good as his word, acting herein as if, by a Pythagorean metempsychosis, some old Roman ghost had possessed the body of this western pagan. . . . He continuing in the same his obstinate resolution, was carried soon after to Stonington, where he was shot to death by some of his own quality. . . . This was the confusion of a damned wretch, that had often opened his mouth to blaspheme the name of the living God, and those that made profession thereof. . . . And when he was told his sentence was to die, he said he liked it well; that he should die before his heart was soft, or had spoken anything unworthy of himself.”¹

     Of the sorrowful conflict in New England between Englishmen and Indians, reaching its reddest crisis in 1676, there is no more graphic or more exquisite literary memorial than a little book written by a woman—who had in her own person a frightful experience of it—Mary Rowlandson, wife of the pastor of the church at Lancaster, then an outpost of civilization. In the bitterness of winter, February the tenth, 1676, while her husband was absent in Boston, the town in which she lived was suddenly assaulted and destroyed by Indians; and she, with her children, was carried away into captivity, experiencing horrible treatment. After eleven weeks and five days, with money raised for the purpose by the women of Boston, she was ransomed; and while all the anguish of her fright and suffering was still fresh in her memory, she wrote a narrative of her captivity, which was first printed in New England in 1682, was reissued in London the same year, and has

been repeatedly published since then.¹ It is a series of life-like pictures of the wild and sorrowful scenes that she had encountered; is most effective in its artless touches of pathos; and is such an exhibition of Indian barbarity as must have driven still deeper into the minds of the New-Englanders their hate of the red men, and their quiet purpose of giving them over to doom. The diction of this little book is admirable, the pure, idiomatic, and sinewy English of a cultivated American matron.

     Another powerful picture of Indian cruelty, but referring to a time nearly thirty years later, is “The Redeemed Captive,” by John Williams,² who, in 1686, at the age of twenty-two, had entered upon his life-long pastorate at Deerfield, Massachusetts. This village was then on the furthest edge of the white settlements, and was protected from Indian assaults only by a rude picketed fort. Sentinels kept guard every night; even in the daytime, no one left his door-steps without a musket; and neighborly communication between the houses was kept up principally by underground passages from cellar to cellar. In the winter of 1704, the inhabitants had received warning of unusual danger approaching them; and at their request twenty soldiers had been sent to them as a special guard. On the night of February twenty-eighth, the watch patrolled the streets until just before dawn, when, unfortunately, they yielded to the desire for sleep; upon which, three hundred Frenchmen and Indians from Canada, who had been skulking in the neighborhood, waiting for such an opportunity, got into the hapless town. What followed, in that hideous winter-darkness, when savage and fiendish lusts were at once let loose upon victims who were absolutely powerless, is told, with genuine pathos, by the pastor,

himself and family being among the chief sufferers.¹ In the same touching manner, he narrates the whole story of his captivity: his long, faint march through the snows to Canada; the cruelties and the courtesies he experienced there; his efforts to recover his children from the Indians; the adroit and persistent attempts of the Jesuits to induce him to apostatize from his faith; and finally, after a bondage of more than two years, his redemption and return home, with all his children, excepting one, a daughter, who remained the rest of her life among her captors.² In the year following his restoration, he published his famous narrative, which has since then been six times reprinted, and has contributed its tinge of horror and hate to the white man’s memory of the Indian.

     In the lineage of New England military prowess, a true descendant of Miles Standish and of John Mason was Colonel Benjamin Church; born at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1639; founder of Little Compton, where he died in 1718; a matchless guerilla-leader; the most famous Indian-fighter of his day; especially renowned as the conqueror of King Philip, and as the invincible champion of the white men in five other wars against the Indians. In his old age, he put into the hands of his son, Thomas, the memoranda he had kept of his campaigns, and he caused to be written and published, in 1716, “Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War . . . as also of Expeditions more lately made against the Common Enemy and Indian Rebels in the Eastern Parts of New England;”³ a book that stirred the very heart of New England, holding

children from play and old men from the chimney-corner,” having indeed a spell almost beyond the reach of literary art. It is a soldier’s bluff narrative of his own dangerous and enticing adventures; it is full of individual incidents-risks, grapplings, bloodshed, leaps in the dark, all manner of stern things. The reader seems to be a listener, and to be sitting by the side of this scarred and ancient paladin of the New England bush-whackers, and to hear his very talk, as he narrates, frankly, vividly, and always with a strong man’s modesty, the deeds that once saved every New England man’s door-post from being bespattered with the blood of his own wife and children.

     Another fine old chronicler of the Indian troubles was Samuel Penhallow, born in England in 1665, and educated at the celebrated dissenting academy of Charles Morton in Newington Green, where he may have had Daniel De Foe for a school-mate. In 1686, with his teacher, he came to New England, intending to complete his studies for the Christian ministry; instead of which, however, he married a young woman of great wealth at Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and thenceforward resided there, devoting himself to the care of his property, and to the public service. He built a stately mansion; lived in the grand manner of our colonial gentry; practised a boundless hospitality; acquired great influence in the province; was for many years its treasurer; and died, as its chief-justice, in 1726. New Hampshire, being then a frontier colony, had in its outlying settlements no rest, day or night, from the peril of an Indian massacre; and in the very year in which Penhallow died, he published, in Boston, “The History of the Wars of New England with the Eastern Indians,”¹ covering the period from 1703 to 1726,—a realistic and vivid story of all that time of anguish, of the various assaults of the Indians upon the habitations of white men,

especially of several stiff and dreadful fights in which the two races grappled together in the woods. He himself says of his book that he might have named it, after Orosius, “De Miseria Hominum,” since it is “no other than a narrative of tragical incursions perpetrated by bloody pagans, who are monsters of such cruelty that the words of Virgil may not unaptly be applied to them:

     He indicates the cruelty of the savages rather by harrowing facts than by epithets; yet the flow of the history is sometimes broken by a sentence in which one almost hears a sob of grief and rage. No veil is cast by him over ghastly and blood-clotted things; our sensibilities are never spared; we come face to face, constantly, with the hard and the horrible. In one place, we read the proclamation of the government offering from ten to fifty pounds for every Indian scalp that shall be brought in; in another, we see a procession of white captives driven onward through the woods, fainting by the way, some of them knocked on the head, “teeming women in cold blood . . . ript open, others fastened to stakes and burnt alive.”² We have a glimpse, too, of a scene like this: A group of Indians one day skulking near the negligent garrison of Haverhill, and taking it by surprise; the sentinel is slain; the only white person at all adequate being a brave woman, who “perceiving the misery that was attending her, and having boiling soap on the fire,” throws it over the assailants, scalding one of them to death. But she is carried off by the savages; after a few days of weariness and cruelty she is delivered of a child; “but the babe soon perished . . . by the cruelty of the Indians, who, as it cried, threw hot embers in its mouth.”³ On another page, we are made acquainted with a most gritty hero, one Lieutenant Bobbins, who, being mortally wounded in Lovewell’s famous

fight, is about to be left on the field by his retreating companions; but “being sensible of his dying state, desired one of the company to charge his gun and leave it with him, being persuaded that the Indians by the morning would come and scalp him, but was desirous of killing one more before he died.”¹

     It lends a sort of charm to this unshrinking narrative of human wretchedness, that the author often dashes his story with reminiscences of his early classical studies, giving to it a gentle flavor of pedantry, and especially suggesting a piquant contrast between lettered and elegant peace and the savagery of the facts which he records. He quotes Virgil, Horace, Plutarch. Now and then he finds a parallelism between these fatal incidents done in the American wilderness, and others done to immortal remembrance in Greek or Roman story: as, that two aged men, “Mr. Phipenny and Mr. Kent,” were attacked by Indians, “and soon fell by their fury; for, being advanced in years, they were so infirm that I might say of them, as Juvenal did of Priam, they had scarce blood enough left to tinge the knife of the sacrifice.”² This conjuction of Priam and Mr. Phipenny is unexpected, at the least.

     We must make room for one more of these historians of New England’s agony of effort against its foes,—Samuel Niles, who was a Harvard graduate, an eminent minister, and the author of a few books on theology and church-polity. His special drift was toward history. In 1747, he published a narrative, in crude verse, of the reduction of Louisburg; and he left in manuscript a volu minous “History of the Indian and French Wars.”³ The life of the author stretched from before the time of King Philip’s War until after the time of the conquest of Canada; and from his own memory he was able to compose

large portions of this work. He used freely, besides, the labors of others. The book is written with some vigor and verbal skill; but the narrative is straggling and long drawn, and the interest of the reader soon perishes in a wilderness of petty details.

     Thomas Prince was born at Sandwich, Massachusetts, in 1687; was graduated at Harvard in 1707; and from 1718 to 1758, the last forty years of his life, was pastor of the South Church, Boston; during all those years filling a high and great space in the thoughts of his contemporaries. He had prepared himself for the public service by diligent study at home, and by eight years of observation abroad; he was a man of most tolerant and brotherly spirit; his days were filled by gentle and gracious and laborious deeds; he was a great scholar; he magnified his office and edified the brethren by publishing a large number of judicious and nutritious sermons; he also revised and improved the New England Psalm Book, “by an endeavor after a yet nearer approach to the inspired original, as well as to the rules of poetry;”¹ he took a special interest in physical science, and formed quite definite opinions about earthquakes, comets, “the electrical substance,” and so forth. For all these things, he was deeply honored in his own time, and would have been deeply forgotten in ours, had he not added to them very unique performances as an historian. No American writer before Thomas Prince, qualified himself for the service of history by so much conscious and specific preparation; and though others did more work in that service, none did better work than he.

     The foundation of his character as an historian was laid in reverence, not only for truth, but for precision, and in willingness to win it at any cost of labor and of time. He

likewise felt the peculiar authority of originals in historical testimony, and the potential value, for historical illustration, of all written or printed materials whatsoever; and while he was yet a college-boy, driven by the sacred avarice of an antiquarian and a bibliographer, he began to gather that great library of early American documents, which kept growing upon his hands in magnitude and in wealth as long as his life lasted, and which, notwithstanding the ravages of time, of British troops, of book-borrowers, and of book-thieves, still remains for him a barrier against oblivion, and for every student of early American thought and action, a copious treasure-house of help.¹

     Even in childhood, Thomas Prince had felt the attractions of American history; even then he had noted some blemishes in the attempts thus far made to write it; and later, during his residence in Europe, he had become conscious of the ambition to give his life to its pursuit: “In my foreign travels I found the want of a regular history of this country everywhere complained of, and was often moved to undertake it; though I could not think myself equal to a work so noble as the subject merits. . . . And yet I had a secret thought that, upon returning to my native country, in case I should fall into a state of leisure, . . . I would attempt a brief account of facts at least, in the form of annals.”² But the pastorship of a great church in Boston was not a state of leisure; and it was not until eighteen years had passed, after his return to New England, that he was able in any measure to gratify his cherished passion. In 1736, he gave to the public the first volume of his “Chronological History of New England, in the Form of Annals,”—the most genuine and the most meritorious piece of historical work published in America up to that date.

     His plan was to write a history somewhat in the manner of Archbishop Usher’s Annals; the principal features being exactness, brevity, and a statement of events in the order of time: an austere scheme, both for writer and for reader, “comprising only facts in a chronological epitome, to enlighten the understanding,” and repelling all “artificial ornaments and descriptions to raise the imagination and affections.”¹

     He was a devotee to historical accuracy, a knight-errant of precise and unadorned fact, an historical sceptic before the philosophy of historical scepticism was born: “I would not take the least iota upon trust, if possible; I examined the original authors I could meet with.”² “Some may think me rather too critical; others that I relate some circumstances too minute. . . . As for the first, I think a writer of facts cannot be too critical. It is exactness I aim at, and would not have the least mistake if possible pass to the world.”³ “In short, I cite my vouchers to every passage; and I have done my utmost, first to find out the truth, and then to relate it in the clearest order. I have labored after accuracy; and yet I dare not say that I am without mistake; nor do I desire the reader to conceal any he may possibly find. But on the contrary I offer this work to the public view, that it may be perused with the most critical eye, that every error may be discovered, and the correction published.”⁴

     Such was his attitude toward historical accuracy. Now let us see what was his attitude toward historical fairness. In another noble passage of self-revelation, he says: “As to impartiality, I know it is usual for the writers of history to assert it, some in their prefaces, others in the front of their works; some in the strongest terms, who have been notoriously guilty of the contrary; and I am apt to think that many are partial who are insensible of it. For myself,

I own I am on the side of pure Christianity; as also of civil and religious liberty, and this for the low as well as high, for the laity as well as the clergy; I am for leaving every one to the freedom of worshipping according to the light of his conscience; and for extending charity to every one who receives the gospel as the rule of his faith and life; I am on the side of meekness, patience, gentleness, and innocence. And I hope my inclination to these great principles will not bias me to a misrecital of facts, but rather to state them as I really find them for the public benefit.”¹

     In carrying out his plan of writing the history of his own country, it seemed to him right to present it in its relations to the precedent history of all the world; for he held that the story of New England was not some isolated and forlorn chapter in the appendix of the book of time, but an integral part of that book, bound up in a volume with the rest in logical and chronological sequence: “It may be grateful to many readers to see the age of the world when this part of the earth came to be known to the other; and the line of time, with the succession of the principal persons, events, and transactions, which had been running on from the creation to the settlement of this country by a colony from England.”² Accordingly, with great pains and great accuracy, and upon a close study of all the leading systems of chronology, as well as of all the original authors in Hebrew, Greek, and Roman history, he proceeds to give the succession of the world’s great events, from Adam, “year one, first month, sixth day,” down to the accession of James the First of England, year sixteen hundred and three, third month, twenty fourth day. At last, having completed this immense introduction, which has its utility, but involved a sad miscalculation of the time at his disposal, and likewise proved to be a porch of inordinate size for his unfinished edifice,

he reaches the chronology of New England, of which the first part extends from the accession of James the First to the settlement of Plymouth, December the thirty-first, 1620; and the second part, from that date to events in New England history as late as August the fifth, 1633.¹

     Throughout the work he is faithful to his promise of giving only nude facts, spurning all embellishments. His entries are made in the hard and compact form of a register, absolutely unimaginative and unemotional; yet as he reaches certain great epochs of history, he seems unable to keep back at least a sentence throbbing with suppressed feeling, or darting with the thrust of a sarcasm. Sometimes, indeed, this parenthetical sentence broadens into a paragraph, and breathes the music of a temperate and fine eloquence. Thus, when about to usher in the discovery of America, he gives himself pause, and says: “We are now to turn our eyes to the west, and see a new world appearing in the Atlantic Ocean, to the great surprise and entertainment of the other. Christopher Columbus or Colonus, a Genoese, is the first discoverer. . . . He becomes possessed with a strong persuasion that in order to balance the terraqueous globe and proportion the seas and lands to each other, there must needs be formed a mighty continent on the other side, which boldness, art, and resolution would soon discover. . . . Ferdinand and Isabella, . . . after five years’ urging, are at last prevailed upon to furnish him with three ships and ninety men for this great enterprise; which, through the growing opposition of his fearful mariners, he at length accomplishes, to his own immortal fame and the infinite advantage of innumerable others.”²

     As he draws near to the time of the settlement of New England, he again stops, and takes a long view, and draws a long breath: “Having passed through the seven great periods of time from the creation to the beginning of the British empire, with the discovery of that Indian shore which is soon to be the theatre of our Chronology, a new face of things appears both to the western parts of Europe and the eastern of America. . . . Divers attempts are made to settle this rough and northern country; first by the French, . . . and then by the English, and both from mere secular views. But such a train of crosses accompany these designs of both nations, that they seem to give it over as not worth the planting; till a pious people of England, not there allowed to worship their Maker according to his institutions only, . . . are spirited to attempt the settlement.”¹ “So there were just one hundred and one who sailed from Plymouth in England; . . . and this is the solitary number who for an undefiled conscience and the love of a pure Christianity, first left their native and pleasant land, and encountered all the toils and hazards of the tumultuous ocean, in search of some uncultivated region in North Virginia, where they might quietly enjoy their religious liberties, and transmit them to posterity, in hopes none would follow to disturb or vex them.”²

     Passages like these, occurring in the midst of long and arid patches of chronological registration, have a sweet and stirring tone; yet the predominant effect of the book is depressing. The publication of it was a disappointment and a failure. A long list of subscribers had shown their interest in the inception of his great work: few had any interest to show in its continuance. Of course the author was discouraged. Nearly twenty years passed by before he had the heart to go on with his task; and then age, illness, public occupations, were too heavy upon him.

Nevertheless, even as a fragment the “Chronological History of New England” is the most scholarly piece of literary work wrought in America during the colonial time; and in the particular sphere of historical writing, it represents not only a great advance upon all that had been achieved among us before its time, but the true method, and the prophecy, of all that was to be achieved among us afterward.

     In 1739, three years after the publication of the great historical treatise of Thomas Prince, appeared an historical brochure, which deserves remembrance for the worthy quality of its work, and as a token of the spread among us of genuine methods of historical inquiry. This is “An Historical Discourse” by John Callender,¹ minister of the First Baptist Church of Newport, Rhode Island. It is a careful and well-written sketch of the history of Rhode Island for the first century of its existence; and is especially notable for its fine antiquarian spirit, for its catholicity of tone, and for the poise and amenity with which the author refers to those painful facts in the early history of Massachusetts that had, in fact, produced the early history of Rhode Island. His prevalent magnanimity of statement gives greater edge and power to his occasional references to the intolerance which had once embittered human life in the elder commonwealth: “In reality the true grounds of liberty of conscience were not then known or embraced by any sect or party of Christians. . . . So that it was not singular or peculiar in those people at the Massachusetts to think themselves bound in conscience to use the sword of the civil magistrate to open the understandings of heretics. . . . These were not the

only people who thought they were doing God good service, when smiting their brethren and fellow-servants. All other Christian sects acted generally as if they thought this was the very best service they could do to God, and the most effectual way to promote the gospel of peace, and prove themselves the true and genuine disciples of Jesus Christ—of Jesus Christ, who hath declared his kingdom was not of this world, who had commanded his disciples to call no man master on earth, who had forbidden them to exercise lordship over each other’s consciences.”¹

     A work which has made for itself a prominent place in the literature of this period, and which, through the notice taken of it by Adam Smith, has been lifted into some European celebrity, is the “Summary, Historical and Political, of . . . the British Settlements in North America.”² Its author was William Douglass, a Scotsman, who, after an ample training in medicine at Leyden and at Paris, came to Boston in 1718, he being then about twenty-seven years of age. In Boston he established himself as a physician; and there he died in 1752. He was a man of large but heterogeneous knowledge, and blessed with a sovereign confidence in himself and his own opinions; and being also dogmatic, intolerant, of quick temper and boundless energy, fiery as a friend, still more fiery as an enemy, fond of strife, glib in speech, with a passion for rushing into print, his life was one prolonged and blissful warfare with all persons whom he could pick a quarrel with,—chiefly, his own professional brethren, likewise the clergy, the magistrates, and the successive governors of the colony.

     He had great sagacity and shrewdness, and a pitiless

way of dissecting fashionable enthusiasms and prejudices; a keen, racy, original diction; infinite courage in utterance. In a land still dominated by Calvinistic orthodoxy, he avowed himself a rationalist, saying that “the wise and thinking part of mankind” had at last learned “to regulate themselves by natural religion only.”¹ He praised David Brainerd as “a true and zealous missionary,” but said that allowances must be made for “his weak, enthusiastic turn of mind.”² He condescended to call the apostle Eliot a good man, but added that it was a sheer waste of labor for him to translate the Bible into the language of a petty tribe of Indians who could not read and were soon to be extinct.³ In the midst of the devout raptures of the people over Whitefield’s preaching; Douglass coolly computed the marketable value of the time spent by them in listening to this “vagrant enthusiast,” and announced that every exhortation of Whitefield in Boston, by diverting laborers from the work by which they supported their families, was a damage to that town to the extent of about a thousand pounds sterling. No sphere of life was safe from his intrusions; no topic escaped the puncture of his criticisms; he was always ready to proclaim his opinions; and even when those opinions failed to be justified by events, he had a Falstaffian assurance in standing by them still, and a Falstaffian wit in covering up the awkwardness of his discomfiture. For example, on account of his hostility to the men at that time in power, he publicly ridiculed the New England expedition for the capture of Cape Breton, declaring that the scheme was a folly, and would be a failure; and when, in due time, the news came that Cape Breton had been captured, he was not in the least disconcerted, merely remarking that he was entirely right in his conjectures, but that “fortune would always wait upon blunderers and quacks.”⁴

     The larger part of mankind seemed to be alike in this,

that they were the objects of his contempt; none more so than the practitioners of medicine in New England in his time: “In our plantations, a practitioner, bold, rash, impudent, a liar, basely born and educated, has much the advantage of an honest, cautious, modest gentleman. In general the physical practice in our colonies is so perniciously bad, that excepting in surgery, and some very acute cases, it is better to let nature under a proper regimen take her course, . . . than to trust to the honesty and sagacity of the practitioner. Our American practitioners are so rash and officious, the saying in . . . Ecclesiasticus . . . may with much propriety be applied to them: ‘He that sinneth before his Maker, let him fall into the hand of the physician.’ Frequently there is more danger from the physician than from the distemper. . . . But sometimes, notwithstanding of malpractice, nature gets the better of the doctor, and the patient recovers. Our practitioners deal much in quackery and quackish medicines, as requiring no labor of thought or composition, and highly recommended in the London quack-billsin which all the reading of many of our practitioners consists. . . . In the most trifling cases they use a routine of practice. When I first arrived in New England, I asked . . . a noted, facetious practitioner, what was their general method of practice. He told me their practice was very uniform: bleeding, vomiting, blistering, purging, anodyne, and so forth; if the illness continued, there was ‘repetendi;’ and finally ‘murderandi’ nature was never to be consuited or allowed to have any concern in the affair. What Sydenham well observes, is the case with our practitioners: "Æger nimiâ medici diligentiâ ad plures migrat.‘”¹

     As an illustration of the amusing audacity of quacks in the English colonies, he also cites a medical advertisement, in which, among other nostrums, the doctor announces “an elegant medicine to prevent the yellow fever

and dry gripes in the West Indies; “and this, Douglass thinks, is only to be equalled by a similar advertisement published in Jamaica, immediately after an earthquake had done great destruction there. The physician offered to the public “pills to prevent persons or their effects suffering by earthquakes.”¹

     During all the long warfare of his career in New England, William Douglass kept his pen constantly wet with ink, producing newspaper articles, pamphlets, medical books; and it was but natural that a man of his versatile and irrepressible activity should try his hand upon what he called history. The book which we have already mentioned, and for which Douglass is now principally remembered, is the evidence of this. He sincerely believed it to be history; and with an amusing unconsciousness of his own traits, he ascribes to himself nearly all the qualities of a great historian, scarcely one of which he was in possession of: “I have no personal disregard or malice, and do write of the present times as if these things had been transacted a hundred years since.”² On the contrary, he was nothing if not partisan and malignant; and his reports of contemporaneous events are saturated with the fury of contemporaneous passions. In truth, he is not an historian at all; he lacks the calmness of history, its disinterestedness, its caution and reserve, its thoroughness, its accuracy, its nobility of expression. His style is hurried, slipshod, irregular; his materials jumbled together in the hotchpotch manner; he flits from topic to topic as the gust strikes him; with all his asserted intellectual humility, he delights to exhibit his polyglot proficiency, and covers his pages with specks of quotation from foreign languages, especially Latin and French. He is essentially a journalist and pamphleteer. He is hot, personal, caustic, capricious; and his history is only a congeries of pungent and racy editorial paragraphs.

     On the first page of the first volume of his “Summary,” he announces his plan for making the book interesting: “Descriptions and bare relations, although accurate and instructive, to many readers are insipid and tedious; therefore a little seasoning is used. Where a ‘mica salis’ occurs, may it not be disagreeable: it is not designed with any malicious, invidious view. For the same reason, a small digression, but not impertinent to the subject, is now and then made use of; as also some short illustrations.” As the history proceeds, he abundantly fulfils his promise of putting “a little seasoning” into the insipid dish of plain narrative—the seasoning of egotistic and sarcastic personalities. Moreover, he constantly acts as the chorus to his own play; he stops its movement, in order to explain something, to justify his method, to express the hope that he is not getting tedious, or to regret that he is violating his intended brevity, and that he is “prolix,” and that his summary “swells too much.” His favorite literary method is digression; and he employs it so frequently that when he does chance to revert to historical narration, the latter seems a sort of lapse from the main purpose of the book. But, as usual with him, finding this method convenient to himself, he stanchly defends it as the only proper one: “This Pindaric or loose way of writing ought not to be confined to lyric poetry; it seems to be more agreeable by its variety and turns, than a rigid, dry, connected account of things.”¹

     Perhaps his most readable passages are the foot-notes, which are very numerous, and are reservoirs for his private opinions—if he can be said to, have had any—his whims, hobbies, and hostilities. He is also very droll in such passages of the text as contain his reasons for not devoting himself to a minute and wearisome study of original authorities upon American history. Thus, on approaching the history of New England, and on surveying the vast extent and complexity of the subject, he relieves himself by the following

comical preliminary groan of indignant criticism “This is a laborious affair, being obliged to consult manuscript records. The many printed accounts are: 1. Too credulous and superstitious. 2. Too trifling. Must the insipid history of every brute . . . or man-animal be transmitted to posterity? 3. The accounts of every white man and Indian mutually killed or otherwise dead, would swell and lower history so much as to render the perusal of such histories (excepting with old women and children) impracticable. 4. The succession of pious pastors, elders, and deacons in the several townships, parishes, or congregations I leave to ecclesiastic chronologers; canonization or sainting seems not consistent with our Protestant principles. 5. The printed accounts in all respects are, beyond all excuse, intolerably erroneous.”¹

     Whether right or wrong in his opinions, he is never wanting in explicitness in stating them. He has a multitude of petted animosities,—the Indians, the French, the Reverend George Whitefield, the Bishop of Cloyne and that prelate’s nostrum of tar-water, paper-money, and so forth; and whenever, in the zigzag progress of his discourse, he catches a glimpse of any of these detested objects, he discharges at them the slugs and hot-shot of his vituperation.

     As for the Indians, “excepting speech, which is natural to mankind, they, seem to have been only a gregarious sort of man-brutes; that is, they lived in tribes or herds and nations, without letters, or arts further than to acquire the necessaries of life; “and until the white men came to America and brought it into connection with the civilized world, “America and the moon were much upon the same footing with respect to Europe, Asia, and Africa.”²

     As for the French, they “are the common nuisance and disturbers of Europe, and will in a short time become the same in America, if not mutilated at home, and in America fenced off from us by ditches and walls, that is,

by great rivers and impracticable mountains. . . . Their promises and faith are by them used only as a sort of scaffolding, which, when the structure is finished, or project effected, they drop. In all public treaties they are ‘gens de mauvaise foi.’”¹

     As for the Reverend George Whitefield, he is “an insignificant person, of no general learning, void of common prudence. His journals are a rhapsody of Scripture-texts and of his own cant expressions. . . . The strength of his arguments lay in his lungs. . . . He and his disciples seemed to be great promoters of impulses, ecstasies, and wantonness between the sexes. Hypocritical professions, vociferations, and itineracies, are devotional quackery.”² As for the Bishop of Cloyne, he “was an enthusiast in many affairs of life, not confined to religion and the education of youth. He invaded another of the learned professions, Medicine. . . . He published a book called ‘Siris, . . . or Tar-Water.’ . . . He ought to have checked this officious genius (unless in his own profession-way he had acquired this nostrum by inspiration) from intruding into the affairs of a distinct profession.”³

     As for paper-money, it is the “fallacious and designed cheat of a plantation government,”⁴ an “iniquitous or base money currency,”⁵ an “accursed affair.”⁶ “I desire readers . . . may excuse prolixity; when this vile chimera or monster comes in my way, I cannot contain myself.”⁷

     Upon the whole, William Douglass may be said to have succeeded in his attempt at being amusing, if not at being instructive. His book contains an enormous mass of miscellaneous but untrustworthy information relating to America and the rest of the world; and our present interest in it is chiefly due to its representation of the author himself; who, certainly, was a very definite, positive, original, and self-centred person, never the echo or the shadow of one.