with the latter, even to the end of the story common to both of them.  So strong and clear is Dr. Palfrey’s avowal of fealty to the honorable and unsullied fame of the founders of Massachusetts, that he will not be likely, on any later page, to qualify what he has already written.  It happens, too, that the points in which any two of our historians would be most disposed to part in judgment lie within the space and the years common to both these writers.  We can but indicate, in a very brief way, some of the more salient divergences between them, and we must preface the specification by acknowledging again the high integrity of both.

Dr. Palfrey writes, unmistakably, as a man proud of his Massachusetts lineage.  He honors the men whose enterprise, constancy, persistency, and wise skill in laying foundations have, in his view, approved their methods and justified them, even where they are most exposed to a severe judgment.  He wishes to tell their story as they would wish to have it told.  They stand by his side as he reads their records, and supply him with a running comment as to meaning and intention.  Thus he is helped to put their own construction on their own deeds,—­to set their acts in the light of their motives, to give them credit for all the good that was in their purposes, and to ascribe their mistakes and errors to a limitation of their views, or to well-founded apprehensions of evil which they had reason to dread.  Under such pilotage, the passengers, at least, would be safe, when their ship fell upon a place where two seas met.  Now Massachusetts and Rhode Island were in stiff hostility during the period here chronicled.  The founder of Rhode Island and nearly all of its leading spirits had been “spewed out of the Bay Colony,”—­and the institutions which the Rhode Islanders set up, or rather, their seeming purpose to do without any institutions, constituted a standing grievance to the rigid disciplinarians of Massachusetts.  Indeed, we have to look to the relations of annoyance, jealousy, and open strife, which arose between the two Colonies in the ten years following 1636, for the real explanation of the severity visited upon the Quakers in Massachusetts in the five years following 1656.  These early Quakers, when not the veritable persons, were the ghosts of the old troublers of “the Lord’s people in the Bay.”  Gorton, Randall Holden, Mrs. Dyer, and other “exorbitant persons,” who had been found “unmeet to abide in this jurisdiction,” could not be got rid of once for all.

Mr. Arnold glories in the early reproach of Rhode Island.  He finds its title to honor above every other spot on earth in the phenomena which made it so hateful to Massachusetts.  In every issue raised between it and the Bay Colony from the very first, and in every element of its strife, he stands stoutly forth as its champion, and casts scornful reflections, though not in a scornful spirit.  Wherever our two historians have the same point under treatment,