the pieces in the game of chess.  Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that of the father or of the mother, as the pawn’s move carries him from one square to the next.  Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white bishop sweeps the board on his own color.  Sometimes the distinguishing characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle strides over the black and white squares.  Sometimes an uncle or aunt lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight’s move were repeated on the squares of human individuality.  It is not impossible, then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early history of New England.

The Reverend Peter Bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or second hand, the Magnolia Christi Americana, of the Reverend Cotton Mather.  The old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies from the London-printed, folio of 1702.

    “He was descended of an Honourable Family in Bedfordshire.—­He was
    born at Woodhil (or Odel) in Bedfordshire, January 31st,
    1582.

“His Education was answerable unto his Original; it was Learned, it was Genteel, and, which was the top of all, it was very Pious:  At length it made him a Batchellor of Divinity, and a Fellow of Saint John’s Colledge in Cambridge.—­

“When he came abroad into the World, a good benefice befel him, added unto the estate of a Gentleman, left him by his Father; whom he succeeded in his Ministry, at the place of his Nativity:  Which one would imagine Temptations enough to keep him out of a Wilderness.”

But he could not conscientiously conform to the ceremonies of the English Church, and so,—­

    “When Sir Nathaniel Brent was Arch-Bishop Laud’s General, as
    Arch-Bishop Laud was another’s, Complaints were made against Mr.
    Bulkly, for his Non-Conformity, and he was therefore Silenced.

“To New-England he therefore came, in the Year 1635; and there having been for a while, at Cambridge, he carried a good Number of Planters with him, up further into the Woods, where they gathered the Twelfth Church, then formed in the Colony, and call’d the Town by the Name of Concord.

    “Here he buried a great Estate, while he raised one still,
    for almost every Person whom he employed in the Affairs of his
    Husbandry.—­