the Scrooby Church and Plymouth Colony.  And the tracing is beautifully done.  An artist may find his paintings in these pages.  Our poets may here find themes which will be the more tempting and rewarding, the more closely they are held to severe historic verity.  They will find, that, after all, the most promising materials for the imagination to deal with are facts.  The residence of the exiles in Holland, their debates and arrangements with respect to a more distant remove, the ocean passage, the first forlorn experiences during two winters at Plymouth, are vividly presented.  The paragraph, on page 182, beginning, “A visitor to Plymouth,” gives us a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall.  If the sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in the most direful and needless self-inflictions.  “Why could they not have been content to cling to the comforts of Old England, and to restrain their wilfulness of spirit?” The question is answered now differently from what it would have been then.  We have used one wrong word about those exiles, in speaking of them as cowering under their woes.  They did not cower, but breasted them.

After another most pregnant and exhaustive episode on Puritan politics in England, Dr. Palfrey brings in that thread of his story on which is strung the fortune of Massachusetts.  It is here that Englishmen will find explained some of our vaunting views of the importance of our annals.  Dr. Palfrey, in this and in other chapters, traces with skill and exactness the course of public measures and events in England, through kingly tyrannies and popular resistance, which ended by harmonizing the institutions of the mother country for a little while with those which had sprung up in this wilderness.  He soon comes upon ticklish matters, but his touch and hold are firm, because he feels sure that he is dealing with men who understood themselves, and who were at least resolute and honest, to whatever degree they may have erred.  Probably, like many of us who are aware that we could not possibly have lived comfortably with our ancestors, he feels all the more bound on that account to set their memory in the light of their noblest and least selfish ends.  He is stout and unflinching in his championship of those ancestors:  he sees in their experiment a lofty ideal; he vindicates their policy in the measures for realizing it; nor does he withhold apologetic or vindicatory words where “unmeet persons” among the whites or Indians stood in the way of it.