We hardly know of fifty octavo pages anywhere in which so much investigation and labor condense their results so intelligibly into such useful information as in each of the first two chapters of this volume.  The first is devoted to the Physical Geography of the Peninsula of New England, its Natural History, and its Aborigines; the second is a summary sketch of the Early Voyages and Explorations.  In this we find the most discriminating view which we have ever seen of the marvellous adventures of John Smith,—­so happily and suggestively described as the “fugitive slave” who was “the founder of Virginia.”  The notes on the credibility and authenticity of the narrations connected with his name are admirable.  In reading these two chapters, one must muse upon the wilderness trampings and the ocean perils of the keen-set and all-enduring men who furnished the material for these high-seasoned pages.

“Puritanism in England” is, of course, the author’s starting-point.  Here he finds his men and their principles.  A partial reformation is the most mischievous influence that can work in society.  It unsettles, but is not willing to rebuild, even when it can learn how to do so.  Reaction and excess are the Scylla and Charybdis of its perils.  Compromise is the very essence of a partial reformation; and compromise in matters of moral and religious concern, where it is not folly, is crime.  Where any party has been in earnest in a strife, there is no honest end at which it can rest till it reaches the goal of righteousness.  The active element of Puritanism was the persistency of a religious party in pursuing a purpose which was yielded up, at a point short of its full attainment, by another branch of the party, which up to that point had made common cause with them.  To speak plainly, the English Puritans regarded their former prelatical and conformist associates as traitors to a holy cause.  They had engaged together in good faith in the work of reformation.  They had suffered together.  When the time came for triumph, a schism divided them; and the more zealous smarted from wounds inflicted by the lukewarm.  It appeared that the Prelatists had been looking to ends of state policy, while the Puritans kept religion in view.  The Conformists thought their ends were reached when Roman prelacy was set aside, and certain local ecclesiastical changes had been effected; but the real Puritans wanted to get and to establish the essential Gospel.

Dr. Palfrey tells this story concisely, but emphatically.  He takes two stages of the Puritan development in England, from which to deduce respectively the emigration to Plymouth and to Massachusetts Bay.  Stopping at intervals to make intelligible the perplexities connected with the patents and charters, his narrative is thenceforward continuous, admitting new threads to be woven into it as the pattern and the fabric both become richer.  For the first time we have the full connection presented in solid history between