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

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 uninterest ing 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.

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

hood, that the British island from which my forefathers came was no lotus-garden, no paradise of serene sky and roses, and music, and merriment, all the year round; no, but a cold, foggy, mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open air, but robust men and virtuous women, and these of a wonderful fibre and endurance; that their best parts were slowly revealed; their virtues did not come out until they quarrelled, they did not strike twelve the first time; good lovers, good haters, and you could know little about them till you had seen them long, and little good of them till you had seen them in action; that in prosperity they were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they were grand." Reserving my judgment as to the more cynical touches in this portrait, I dare to say that he who wishes to find the original has no need to cross the ocean for it. No small portion of that picture was probably evolved from Mr. Emerson's own inner consciousness.

The English tourist expecting to hear strange words in this country will not be disappointed; especially if, like the majority of Englishmen, he is more familiar with the Times newspaper than with his Bible. But, as a fact, he is listening almost every minute, to some word which was familiar in the mouths of his forefathers 250 years ago. The author of "The Dictionary of Americanisms," considers that in no part of the world is the English language spoken in greater purity by the great mass of the people than in the United States; and we can see at a glance, that a country which learned to talk from the old mother when she herself was speaking her best and noblest, is not unlikely to have preserved a tolerably pure tongue. The opinion of Dr. Bartlett may very reasonably be accepted when he says that the idiom of New England is as pure English, taken as a whole, as was spoken in England at the period when these colonies were settled." No one can doubt the accuracy of Mr. Lowell's statement, that a person familiar with the dialect of certain parts of Massachusetts will not fail to recognize in ordinary discourse many words now noted in English. Vocabularies as archaic, the greater part of which were in common use about the time of the King James' translation of the Bible. Shakespeare stands less in need of a glossary to most New Englanders than to many a native of the old country."

A man of the Commonwealth period, I suppose, would readily understand much in the phraseology which now strikes an English ear as peculiar in these Eastern States. He would know what his genial host meant when he told him that he "did admire" to see him eat; he would have no difficulty in grasping what the farm servant had been about who had been "doing chores;" he would not look round for a strait jacket when his friend told him that he had got "mad" at being overreached in a bargain; he would not confine the idea of being "sick" to the humiliating remembrances of his late sea voyage; he would, without much intellectual effort, unravel the various meanings attached to the word "clever;" he would even make himself sufficiently at home to "sit a spell" with his hostess; and compliment her baby on looking "cunning," without dreaming that he was ascribing to it a quality which, however admirable to Talleyrand in Machiavelli, is scarcely appropriate to that child-like nature which is welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven. But the Englishman of to-day is very differently placed. He is offended at having any one "admire" to see him eat, perplexed to be told to do "chores," suspicious if any neighbor of his owns to being "mad," disgusted that, if his friend has to be "sick," he should not preserve a decorous secrecy as to his misfortunes, a little pleased at being called "clever," but offended beyond the possibility of reconciliation when charged with "cunning." Unless he takes to reading his Bible, it is to be feared that he will fail to learn that, for the first time in his life, he has been drinking from the pure well of English undefiled.

The proper names of New England are equally antiquated with many of the words in common use. Although the pas sion for the classics has immortalized Cornelius Gracchus Jones; and the genius of patriotism has multiplied George Washingtons with a rapidity which might almost have disturbed the equanimity of the father of his country; and the late trouble has given Ulysses a resurrection in scenes far enough from "the ringing plains of windy Troy," yet the honest old Biblical names linger still. A country burial ground in New England recalls to us the Puritan love for Faith, Hope, and Charity; for the prophets Ezekiel and Hosea; for the apostle whose name

was called Cephas, which, being by interpretation a stone, must have seemed very appropriate to the soil of Connecticut; and for Job's daughters, Kezia and Jemima and Keren-happuch, who would need all their beauty to compensate them for so uneuphonious a start in life. There was pathos in the choice of Submit, always, I believe, given to the weaker vessel; there was equal significance in such a cognomen as Patience; and, not long since, I found an old sailor on Martha's Vineyard, with the visions of departed whalers still gathering in his eyes, who had the most suggestive name of Consider Fisher; and who has certainly made his calling if not his election sure, by the meditative vocation of a ferry man.

If language be correctly defined as "fossil history," we may expect to find that something besides a vocabulary has survived these two hundred and fifty years. Speech is very much the creation of character; and it becomes a question, therefore, how far the Englishman of 1600 is reproduced, among us to-day, in his distinctive features.

The class from which the first New England settlers sprang was by no means lacking in courtesy if they were in culture; and it is probably owing to this that there is so much natural and unaffected considerateness in the good neighborship of these Eastern States. The formal "sir" and "ma'am," addressed by children to their parents, is a relic of the time when it was not altogether unfashionable to honor one's father and mother; and although this habit of speech grates upon the ears of a stranger, it is undoubtedly a wholesome one enough in a country where every boy believes that he may rise to be president, and acts as though he had already attained to that supreme distinction.

Nowhere, I suppose, is more respect paid to work than in New England; nowhere would an idle man starve more quickly; and this again is directly traceable to the conditions of life in a country which when asked for bread gave instead a stone. The Englishman of the Elizabethan era was an intensely practical man. Fertile in expedients, his imagination was never divorced from his resolve to get on. Benjamin Franklin, a Bostonian by birth, was no unworthy heir to this nature. The slanderous association of wooden nutmegs with