Essex, and the year of his coming into the world, 1604. As early as during his student life it is recorded that Eliot had a partiality for philological inquiries, and was an acute grammarian, a turn of mind, we may suppose, which afterward had its influence in stimulating and directing his labours on the language of the Indians. Upon leaving the university, young Eliot engaged in school-teaching. This profession bore early in the seventeenth century the stigma of trade, and, like other trades in England, was looked down upon. Cotton Mather, Eliot's first biographer, labours hard to prove to us that his subject is not to be despised because he once pursued the calling of a teacher - and succeeds in being very amusing in this unnecessary defence.

Eliot, however, early felt stirring within him the desire to leave teaching for the

work of a minister of the gospel. In these circumstances, and because he saw that only by self-exile could a parson of his persuasion escape the searching tyranny of Laud, he turned his thoughts to the new western world, where a refuge had already been found by many ministers of whom England had rendered herself unworthy.

Thus it came about that on the third of November, 1631, our young parson Eliot arrived in Boston on the good ship Lyon, the same bark upon which the wife and children of Governor Winthrop came over. Mr. Eliot was now twenty-seven years of age, and, though no picture of him at this age is extant, there is reason to believe that he must have looked much as he does in the popular paintings and prints, grave, but gentle rather than Puritanically grim, beardless, and lacking, of course, the wig against which he all his life inveighed.

No sooner had he landed than he found a field of usefulness, and was called to the work upon which his heart was set. When he left England a considerable number of his friends in the old country, who loved him and sympathized in his views, had thought of following him to America, and to them he had given his word that, if they carried that plan into effect, and should arrive in New England before he had formed a regular pastoral connection with any other church, he would be their minister and devote himself to their service. The next year they came to claim the fulfilment of this pledge, and though Boston strove earnestly to obtain Eliot's services, he was true to his bargain, and on the fifth of November, 1632, he began his life tenure of the pastorate of the church at Roxbury.

One other pledge Eliot had made in his