the godly to be cruel; and this spirit broke out in the colonies almost as soon as these colonies were founded. From that date to the present hour, the quaint, dry flavor of wit enlivens sermons and addresses, protests and manifestoes. Often, like the red pepper which used to be rubbed into the bleeding back of the mutinous sailor after the infliction of the lash, it must have increased the irritation of the victims; but as we meet with it to-day it has lost its virus and retains only its humor.

Now, when we pass in review the men who in this age have built up a distinctively American style, indigenous, and little if at all indebted to European models, we see at once the same humorous spirit which charms us yet in the literature of the early Stuarts. Many of the most popular authors of New England possess it in a very marked degree. The inimitable sketch of the Custom House at Salem, which opens up the story of the Scarlet Letter, could not have been drawn by Dickens or Thackeray. It is colored most richly from antique sources of inspiration. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is the work of a man who knows the meeting-house, who loves the ancestral jokes at the expense of deacons and elders, and who is not ashamed to quote Scripture, with a familiarity dating back to the honest training of a New England Sunday. Hugh Latimer, in his plain talk from Paul's Cross, might have said to take only one illustration-what the Professor at the Breakfast Table does say, in reference to those death-bed repentances which are frequent enough, when the bed is of the simplest construction and furnished at the expense of the State: "Most murderers die in a very happy frame of mind, expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man believes he shall meet a larger average of pirates and cut-throats in the streets of the New Jerusalem than of honest folks that died in their beds."

The New England sketches of Mrs. Stowe, of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and of that most charming writer Mr. Donald Mitchell, would lose half their effectiveness if this peculiar traditional fragrance of old time humor were exchanged for the painful puns of Hood, or the ponderous pleasantries of Dickens' later novels.

In Mr. Lowell, however, we shall find the most remarkable case of modern Puritan humor. Himself the son of a New

England clergyman, he has an inherited tendency to make moral applications, and to improve the occasion. Even when he is composing poetry the hereditary genius of the pulpit asserts itself, in strange fellowship with the original genius of the poet. We find him indulging in the quips and quirks which were so dear to the Jacobean poetasters. George Herbert might gladly have assumed the authorship of such a stanza as that in the prelude to the Vision of Sir Launfal:

"Earth gets its price for what earth gives us ;

The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in ;

At the devil's booth are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking,
'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis only God may be had for the asking,

There is no price set on the lavish summer,

And June may be had by the poorest comer."

Passage after passage in The Bigelow Papers, a satire which owes nothing to Butler, to Swift, or to Pope, might be taken almost at random, to illustrate our point. The mould of the poems is antiquated, the farmers and parsons are of a traditional type, the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A. M., might have been among the first graduates of Yale, and Birdofredum Sawin is only Praise-God-Barebones with a thin republican veneer upon him. It is the humor of the seventeenth century that breathes in such a couplet as this:

"A marciful Providence fashioned us holler,

O' purpose that we might our principles swaller,"

and in that famous Peace Society sentiment:

The sly fun

"Ef you take a sword an' dror it,

An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment aint to answer for it,

God'll send the bill to you."

of an Elizabethan preacher peeps out in Mr. Wilbur's note. "The first recruiting sergeant on record I conceive to have been that individual who is mentioned in the new Book of Job, as going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it" and his quiet tilt at the law. "Indeed when hath Satan been forced to seek for an attorney?" is in a puritan form, although, I believe the sentiment itself is

"not for an age but for all time." The success of this wonderful satire was due not alone to the fact that it appeared at the right moment, but equally to another fact: it is a fair reflection of the dialect, the habits, and the thoughts of thousands of shrewd and yet simple-hearted men in New England. However much, for purposes of effect, the features may be exaggerated no one at all familiar with the farm-life of New Hampshire, Vermont, or Massachusetts can charge it with being caricature. Scarcely a newspaper appears at this hour which has not touches akin to that which will make The Bigelow Papers immortal; and in the casual conversation at every vil lage store one may run a chance of meeting Hosea, the young farmer, or Homer, the venerable parson. How obstinately this peculiar spirit, in which the first founders of the Eastern States were steeped, held its own, may be seen at once by a comparison of the literature of New England for the last two hundred and fifty years with that of the mother country during the same period; and then by placing side by side such humorists as Lowell and Tom Hood, such romancists as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dickens, and such poets as Longfellow and Tennyson.

"Eight days before announcing his resolve to govern henceforth without Parliament, Charles I. granted the charter which established the colony of Massachusetts." This abandonment, this defiance, indeed, of constitutional freedom in the Old World was coeval with its establishment in the New. How dear both the country and the laws by which it was governed had become to the colonists is proved by the fact that they had no hesitation in declining Cromwell's offer of a home for them in Ireland if they would return. Their black and stony Patmos was already too precious to be deserted even for so tempting a prize as a settlement in that Emerald paradise "contiguous," as Lord Beaconsfield pleasantly observed, "to the melancholy ocean," and then, as now, shrouded in perpetual showers, and convulsed by chronic revolutions. "We enjoy," said the inhabitants of New England, "the liberties of the Gospel in its purity, and our government is the happiest and wisest this day in the world." So they deliberately preferred the neighborships of the tawny Narragansetts to that of the O'Neills ;

and slept the sleep of the just, little dreaming that if they could get on without Ireland the time would come when Ireland could not get on without them. "I like so well to be here," heroic John Winthrop wrote home from Massachusetts to his wife, "that I do not repent my coming." Mr. Emerson, in whom, although not without some traces of eccentric evolution, so much of this fine simplicity of the Puritan nature survives, boldly claims that the true end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation. "'Tis not free institutions, 'tis not a democracy that is the end -no, but only the means. Morality is the object of government. We want a state of things in which crime will not pay, a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man." This same spirit, bursting forth in the English Commons, and defying alike the petulance of James, and the treachery of Charles, lived and flourished in New England. Nor has it ever died out. I think that there is more wholesome popular patriotism in this country than can be found anywhere else, because it is created not by a sense of grievances, but by a consciousness of rights. Hence there is, and probably always has been, a good fellowship in New England cities which even their growth has not crushed out. Boston is only a large village; and the ancient English right to feed all the geese of the parish on the public pasture exists there to-day, in the shape of the honest and simple pride which every citizen seems to feel in the famous common. You are not so much in a mass of houses as in the hearts of an intensely earnest and real moral life, in the towns of New England. There is, I dare to think, no village but might safely be trusted to govern itself, and even, if need were, to draw up a State Constitution or to formulate a fresh Declaration of Independence. The patriotism of the country has not yet been divorced from its piety. Among the native populations this patriotism has always been devout. The tea might have been flung into Boston Bay to the doxology, and Paul Revere's ride beats out to the music of a psalm tune. Thanksgiving and Fast Day are realities still,—especially the former, and we eat our turkey in the spirit of heroes who are prepared, if necessary, to take the place of the hapless bird, and die for our principles.

Because this is so, we need to glance for a moment at the religious sentiment in New England. For statesmen and philosophers, quite as much as for divines rises the question: How is it that the one country in the world which has now not State-paid church is so illustrious for its religious life? When New England was first colonized, the Puritan spirit was strong in the mother country. The royalist captain marched to meet the Roundheads beneath a banner of azure silk, friezed with silver, and bearing the motto: "For Religion, King, and Country." The Bible was the great intellectual phenomenon of the reign of Elizabeth. "The whole moral effect which is produced, nowadays, by the religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, the lecture, the missionary report, the sermon, was," says Mr. Green, "then produced by the Bible alone. A new conception of life and of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious impulse spread through every class.' "Theology," in the words of Grotius, "theology ruled then." The study of the country gentleman and of the higher yeoman, of such men, in fact, as many of the early colonists were, pointed toward theology. In the opinion of an historian so impartial as Mr. Green, "the whole nation became, in fact, a church." From the land in such a State, so utterly unlike the dissipation of the later Stuarts, and the dulness of the Georges, sprang New England. "We all," I quote from one of the oldest of American written constitutions, "came into these parts of America to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity and peace." "New England," as it has been truly said, was "the colony of conscience." "The bulk of the early settlers were God-fearing farmers from Lincolnshire and the eastern counties. They desired, in fact, only the best' as sharers in their enterprise, men driven from their fatherland, not by earthly want, or by the greed of gold, or by the lust of adventure; but by the fear of God and the zeal for a godly worship."

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The record of sermons preached on Fast Days, and Thanksgivings would present us with an unbroken line of political manifestoes; but the habit of preaching political sermons is itself an importation. When James Melvil, and other clergymen, complained to James the First that the king's common talk was invectives agaiust ministers and their doctrine, the