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Henry B. Stearns, M.D., Hartford, Conn. 470

IV. The Historic Religions of India. I. Brahmanism.

Rev. C. W. Clapp, Godfrey, Illinois. 487

V. Oppert's Kingdom of Corea. Dr. S. Wells Williams, Yale College. 509

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The Bible Reader's Commentary. The New Testament, in Two Volumes.
Vol. II: The Acts, the Epistles, and the Revelation. Prepared by J.
Glentworth Butler, D.D.

556

The Antiquities of Israel. By H. Ewald.

557

The true story of the Exodus of Israel. Compiled from the work of Dr. Brugsch by F. H. Underwood.

557

The Gospel Miracles in their relation to Christ and Christianity. By Wm.
M. Taylor, D.D.

558

Lectures on the Origin and Growth of the Psalms. By Thomas C. Murray.
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. By John Caird, D.D.
Life Its True Genesis. By R. W. Wright.

558

560

562

The Life and Writings of St. John. By J. M. MacDonald, D.D.
Critical and Exegetical Handbook to the Gospels of Mark and Luke. By H.

563

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Blanqui's History of Political Economy in Europe. Translated by Emily J.
Leonard.

567

A Text-Book of Church History. By Dr. John C. L. Gieseler.
Lecturas de Clase, escojidas de autores Españoles que hoy viven. Colec-

568

cionadas y anotadas por D. Guillermo I. Knapp.

568

THE

NEW ENGLANDER.

No. CLVII.

JULY, 1880.

ARTICLE I.-OLDER ENGLAND.

IN one of the later writings of Mr. Ruskin, there is to be found a passage, full of that pathetic eloquence of which he is so great a master, in which he describes the change that a few years have wrought in a piece of lowland scenery in South England. When first he remembers it, he says, "no clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant lips of the hand which giveth rain from heaven'; no pastures ever lightened in spring time with more passionate blossoming; no sweeter homes ever hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful gladness-fain hidden-yet full confessed." Now, "the human wretches of the place cast their street and house foulness just in the very rush and murmur of the first spreading currents, they having neither energy to cart it away, nor decency to dig it into the ground.' "No joy," says this Knight of the Rueful Countenance, who may be forgiven for abusing his own country because he does so in such heroic language, "no joy shall be possible to heart of man forevermore, about these wells of English waters." The change which twenty busy years have worked in this little span of Old England is only typical of that which has been going on the 30

VOL. III.

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whole land over. After a day's search for the famous May Pole Inn, of Barnaby Rudge, an American traveler, in place of the fine old hostelrie, with its vast apartments, mullioned windows, and portly host, found only "the ugliest, commonest, newest, railway beer-house." The England even of Charles Dickens, if it ever existed, has passed away. The railway conductor has driven the many-caped coachman off the road for ever; and the driver of to-day is no more like the famous Mr. Weller than a claret bottle is like a demijohn. What the mother country was like, even at the beginning of the present century, we can only faintly surmise, from the features which meet our eye at the present time; the transformation of the last eighty years has built up an England as unlike that of the third George, as that, in its turn, was unlike the country of the Wars of the Red and White Rose. age of the Wycliffes, Cobhams, Arundels, Beckets: of the Latimers, Mores, Cranmers; of the Taylors, Leightons, Herberts; of the Sherlocks and Butlers, is gone. Silent revolutions in opinion have made it impossible that men like these should return." "Could the England of 1685," writes Lord Macaulay, "be, by some magical process, set before our eyes, we should not know one landscape in a hundred, or one building in ten thousand. The country gentleman would not recognize his own field. The inhabitant of the town would not recognize his own street. Everything has been changed, but the great features of nature, and a few massive and durable works of human art." In no part of the world has transformation been more rapid or more radical than in this country of England which we are wont to picture as lying like a sleeping giant, the moss growing on his eyebrows, slumber sitting enthroned on his countenance, and his limbs decently composed into an attitude of rest, which even peninsular wars and colonial revolutions are not potent to disturb.

I have spoken of the disappointments of an American enthusiast searching in England for the traces of his favorite idols. At the risk of outraging the progressive spirit of this age and land, I venture to turn the tables on that experience. Let the English traveler in this country, instead of going west, from New York, go east. Let him pause in New Haven and Hart

ford. Let him visit Saybrook and New London. Let him go in search of Plymouth Rock, or climb the steep streets of Providence. Let him traverse the Holy Land of Boston Common, and linger under the impecunious shadow of the Old South. Let him stroll along the wharves of Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard; and spend an hour amid the quaint head-stones of a New England burial ground. My conviction is that he will come away with the impression that he has never been before in quite such an old-world country as this. He has left old England, indeed; but it is only to find an older England still 3000 miles nearer to the setting sun. Gradually he learns, from actual observation, what his own country was like in the early part of the seventeenth century. On these crumbling Massachusetts docks, it would be little surprise to him to come upon old Sir John Hawkins drinking his ale; on this cheerful Connecticut village green he half expects to see John Bunyan, playing at cat; and there are a hundred solemn meeting houses in Vermont in which he would sit, almost without astonishment, to hear some "pious and painful divine" comparing Charles Stuart to Judas Iscariot, and John Hampden to the heroic Gideon. In the words of Mr. Lowell: "After all, this speculative Jonathan is more like the Englishman of two centuries ago than John Bull is. He has lost somewhat in solidity, has become fluent and adaptable, but more of the original groundwork of character remains. He is nearer than John by at least a hundred years to Naseby, Marston Moor, Worcester, and the time when, if ever, there were true Englishmen." Nor is this greatly to be wondered at. New England was severed for over two centuries from the events which, without convulsing, changed the mother country. The rise and fall of dynasties; the reflex influence of immense colonial acquisitions; new fashions in dress and in dialect currents of strong intellectual thought; the literary infection from Dryden and Butler, from the shameless Aphra Behn, or the cumbrous Johnson; the military fever which rose high with Marlborough; the passion for the sea which sang its songs round Nelson; the honest Georgian stupidity which loved. beer so much more than what it called "Boetry"-all these told on Old England with far more power than on New. In

t;

the ages before telegraphs and steamships Boston was further from London than Hong Kong is now, and Massachusetts caught very faintly, if she caught at all, the scandal of courts and the gossip of coffee-houses in the distant metropolis. I am not starting out therefore on a Quixotic quest, when I come to the New England of to-day for a much clearer revelation of the Old England of 1600 than can be found anywhere else.

The first settlers in this country of which we are now to speak, sprang largely from the eastern counties of England. This fact is of itself significant. When Queen Elizabeth ungraciously said, during her progress through Devon, that she did not wonder that the wise men came from the East, since she had been unable to find any in the West, she spoke in a moment of irritation; and sacrificed truth to sarcasm. The most venturesome of her sailors were, in fact, men of Devon and Cornwall. But I suspect the conscience of her kingdom was not with them, but rather in that flat, dull, and uninteresting country which an Englishman associates with Norfolk and Suffolk. It is striking that hailing from this eastern part of the land, the pilgrim and puritan found their way to a coast not unlike that which they had left. The greatest living English poet, himself a native of Lincolnshire, has struck off, in many of his lines, pictures of the eastern seaboard of England, which still find their counterparts on the shores of Massachusetts.

"The plain was grassy, wild, and bare,
Wide, wild, and open to the air,
Which had built up everywhere

An under-roof of doleful gray"

To us, who know what New England weather is like, this little sketch seems very familiar. When "ever the weary wind went on, and took the reed-tops as it went" we hear the salt meadow grass near home rustling in the breeze. The "hollow ocean ridges roll and roar in cataracts" all the way from Mount Desert to Watch Hill; and Locksley Hall, with its "dreary gleams about the moorland," might have found a congenial setting overlooking the sandy tracts of Long Island or Cape Cod. "I was given to understand," said Mr. Emerson, in a speech delivered before an English audience, "in my child

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