VOL. XIII.

No. 3.

CHAPTER VIII.

century when the Constitution was, we may

GINNING OF THE COLONIES.

W

The In

E are now drawing nearer to modern times; we have reached times in which everybody has some notion, if sometimes a wrong notion, of the main events and the great names. tellectual Development of the English People goes on so fast and in so many ways that it is hard to keep up with it on a small scale. Every thing cannot be spoken of; many things, many men, must be left out. becomes largely a matter of chance what we speak of and what we pass by. But there are none the less great and characteristic events which stand out above others. The main tendencies of the age can be grasped and set forth, while many of the particular forms which they take must be left to shift

for themselves.

It

We have now reached the seventeenth century. At the first glance of that century as seen in the isle of Britain, it stands out as a time even more full of stirring events than the sixteenth. But it hardly seems a time of such great and lasting force changes. No events in the English history of any age are more striking than the Great Civil War, the putting to death of the King, the Commonwealth, the Protectorate, the Restoration of the Monarchy. And there is no one event that makes a greater political landmark than the Revolution of the later days of the same

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the end of the seventeenth century, we again feel as if the men who were then living were farther apart from the men who lived at its beginning than men who are a hundred And yet of formal years apart always are. outward change there seems less than in some other periods of the same length. The great events of the middle of the century look as if they were in a manner undone by And the great

events which followed them. event at the end of the century may in one way seem hardly to mark any change at all. For it was before all things, not the establishment of any thing new, but the confirmation of something old. The Civil War and its results seem to have made less change than the Reformation of Religion and the other events of the sixteenth century, merely because by the Kings' Restoration the old state of things seems to have been brought

back.

In truth it was not brought back. There was a wide and marked gap indeed between the times after the Restoration and the times before the Civil War. And the men who lived at the time felt it so to be.

In short, there is no time when we feel

more fully than we do in the seventeenth century that the familiar division into centuries, convenient as it is, is often misleading. The beginning of the seventeenth century, if we take the year 1603 rather than 1600, is distinctly a landmark; a great deal may be said to have died with Queen Elizabeth. But there is no such gap as parts the times before

the Civil War from the times after it. The time from the completion of the Reformation under Elizabeth to the beginning of the Civil War, a time somewhat less than a century, forms more of a whole than the two halves of the sixteenth century or than the two halves of the seventeenth.

But, if we look beyond the isle of Britain to the history of the English folk all over the world, we shall see, not only that the seventeenth century is, in that point of view, the most important age since the fifth and sixth, but that it is of all centuries, the one which is most thoroughly a whole. The seventeenth century stands out, in the history of our folk and of the whole world, as the time when the English folk won themselves their third home. From this point of view we may sum up the history of the last three centuries in some way like this. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the English folk had but one home, in the isle of Britain. We say but one home, because in the course of thirteen hundred years the English folk in Britain had so utterly parted from their first home on the mainland of Europe that the men of the first England and of the second could no longer be looked on as the same people. At the beginning of the seventeenth century then the English folk had but one home; at the end of the seventeenth century it had two. But the younger of the two was immeasurably smaller than the elder and was politically dependent on it. By the end of the eighteenth century the younger home of the English folk had become politically independent of the elder. And now, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to which we are now drawing near, the younger home has, in every physical respect, become greater than the elder. All this, in the history of the nation as a nation, is greater than the setting up and casting down of Kings, Commonwealths, and Protectors. We must further remember that the causes which had to do with the Civil War had also a great deal to do with the settlement of the English folk in its third home. But we must again remember that, though those causes had a great deal to do with the settlement, yet the settlement did not owe its beginning to them. They did but give greater strength and a wider range to a movement that was already at work. The settlement of the English in America was a direct result of that general

stir, that spirit of discovery and adventure, which caused the American continent to be known at all. The political and religious movements which gave rise to the Civil War greatly helped on settlement in America; they found such settlement answered many of their purposes. But they did not give it the first start. In other words, Virginia is older than New England.

We said just now that, in this way of looking at it, the seventeenth century was more thoroughly a whole than any other century of our history. The English settlements in America belong to the seventeenth century; they fill up the seventeenth century; they largely derive their character from the fact that it was in the seventeenth century that they were made. Before the seventeenth century settlement was at most attempted; it was never really carried out. During the whole of the seventeenth century settlement was going on. After the seventeenth century settlement became far less active; in the eighteenth only one wholly new colony was added to those which were founded in the seventeenth. The eighteenth century saw a great deal of conquest of distant possessions, but very little of colonization in the true sense. Its later years did indeed point the way to a fourth home of the English folk in the Southern Ocean; but they only pointed the way. The spread of the English folk, as a folk, winning new homes, over the whole world has been the work of the seventeenth century and of the nineteenth.

The settlement of the English in America in the seventeenth century had much in common with the first settlement of the English in Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries; it had also much that was widely different. The two are parted by all that parts the sixth century from the seventeenth. That is, the English people in the seventeenth century had become widely different from the English people in the sixth century. And besides this, there were wide differences in the circumstances of the settlements themselves. The later settlement was made at the cost of mere savages; the earlier was made at the cost of a people in some things more advanced than the settlers, a people who kept the memory of a great power which had but lately passed away. Still the actual settlement in a new land, the occupying of a new home, the beginning of every thing afresh,

were all common to both settlements. We may say that the settlers of the seventeenth century found themselves in the same case as the settlers of the fifth, only with the benefit of all the advance that had been made between the fifth century and the seventeenth. But both were doing essentially the same work, a work which no Englishman had been called on to do in all the ages between. And yet there was one great difference in their results. The settlement of the fifth century founded a nation in every sense. As we said before, the English who settled in Britain parted off altogether from the English who stayed on the mainland. The English who settled in America did not in the same way part off, they could not and did not wish to part off from the English who stayed in Britain. Too much had happened between the two settlements to allow of this. The English settlements in America did not at once found a new nation, though they led to the foundation of a new nation in the next century. But it was only in a political sense that a new nation was founded. The English folk was split into two independent powers, whereas before it had formed only one. But, though this truth is sometimes forgotten on both sides, in all else that goes to make up a nation, in language and law and countless other things, the two independent powers remained as truly one people as they had been before.

The English settlers in America took with them, as far as they could, the state of things which they left behind them in Britain. But they could not take it with them in every thing. A colony, simply because it is a colony, cannot exactly reproduce the state of things in the mother-country. And there were circumstances in some of the American colonies which made the settlers specially wish in some points not to reproduce the state of things in the mother-country. But on the whole the England of the seventeenth century was reproduced in America as far as it could be. It was naturally reproduced, both in manners and institutions, in a simpler form. The settlers, having necessarily fallen back on an older and simpler kind of life, naturally reproduced older and simpler institutions. A New England town-meeting, for instance, did not exactly reproduce any thing that was in use in Old England at the time of the settlement. But it cannot be called a new thing; it was a new shoot from a very

old stock. It was a falling back, most likely an unwitting falling back, on the oldest institutions of the English and all other Teutonic nations. The seventeenth century fell back on the sixth, because it found itself in some respects in the circumstances of the sixth. And there is still left on many things in America a strong impress of the seventeenth century. As is sure to happen in such cases, of the severed branches of the one folk, each kept some old things that the other dropped; each took up some new things that the other did not take up. Thus the British visitor to America, among much that is new, marks also much that is old. He marks much that comes straight from the England of the seventeenth century. He soon finds out that, while many things in America are palpably very new, whatever is not palpably very new is commonly old, often older than the thing which answers to it in Old England. This is true in language, law, custom, and many other things. Especially what are commonly called “Americanisms" in language, when they are not palpably new, are pretty sure to be simply the English usage of the seventeenth century, staying on in America when forgotten in Old England.

But there was one point above all in which the English settlements in America connect themselves with the great English events of the seventeenth century, and thereby with those of the sixteenth. We must go back to the religious Reformation. That was a work of the sixteenth century; but we see its fruits best in the seventeenth. The result of the religious changes of the sixteenth century was, as we have seen, to give the English Church a shape intermediate between two extremes on each side. But, while this divided the nation less than any other system could have done, it naturally displeased both those who held that change had gone too far, and those who held that it had not gone far enough. It is hard to find names for religious parties which will at once satisfy truth and please the parties; but we may distinguish those who held that change had gone too far as Roman Catholics, and those who held that it had not gone far enough as Puritans. The Roman Catholics, after they found that they could no longer conform to the established law in religious matters, became a small persecuted body, glad if they could escape with their lives and

has to do with so many things that it has carried us on to questions of language and literature rather before their time. But the plantation of the American colonies was only one form, though in this century it was the chief form, of the general spirit of enterprise in distant lands which began in the sixteenth century, and which has gone on ever since. The adventurous warfare with the Spaniards in America which plays so great a part in the sixteenth century comes to an end in the early part of the seventeenth. One may say that peaceful settlement in America takes its place. But plantation in America was not the only form that English enterprise took at this time. It was the time of a great spreading of distant trade, and there are countries in which trade can hardly fail gradually to grow into dominion. The trade with Russia began in the sixteenth century when Russia, approached only by the White Sea, was almost a newly discovered land. Then there was the trade with the Levant. Neither of these could grow into dominion; but when the trade with India began, at the very end of the sixteenth century, and went on increasing in the seventeenth, the foundation of distant English dominion was laid. The dominion did not come yet, and, when it did come, it was dominion and not settlement; but it could not fail to come before long. Actual possession began when Bombay was ceded by Portugal to England on the marriage of Charles the Second. With it was ceded Tangier in Africa, a much nearer possession of no real value, which was soon given up. But it too marks the same feeling of striving of enterprise and dominion far away. The Puritan movement led us to the translation of the Bible. It is the translation of the Bible which binds together the English tongue and literature of all the times from the sixteenth century onwards. In other matters of language, literature, taste, and manners, the gap between the first and the second half of the seventeenth century is very wide. In the first half, before and during the Civil War, we see a certain stateliness and a certain quaintness standing side by side. Men seem in earnest, as men engaged, or likely to be engaged, in a great struggle. It was a time of learning, a time of thought. The religious controversy produced divines and thinkers on all sides in theology, and some who went beyond the bounds of any theology. It was a time of great lawyers,

specially of lawyers who, like Selden, combined other forms of learning with their professional knowledge. The growth of a political system of large states in Europe had led, chiefly among the jurists of the Netherlands, to the new science of international law, which found its way into England also. The study of our own history and of its ancient records went on, and men began to make something like a scientific examination of our ancient tongue. Some branches of natural science advanced; every one has heard of the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Charles the First's physician, Harvey. But one may say roughly that learning strikes us more as a characteristic of the first part of the century and natural science as a characteristic of the second.

As for our language itself, it went on drawing to itself many Latin words. Perhaps its most remarkable feature just now is that this was the special time of experiments in language. New words and phrases were invented, some of which took root and some did not. It is not uncommon to find that a word or phrase which has come in as an innovation in modern times was used by one writer in the seventeenth century, and by one only. It was a great time of English prose, in some shapes grave and stately, in others full of quaint fancies. And a child of the Civil War itself, the Puritan John Bunyan, knew how, without school-learning, to write clear and strong English such as was never outdone before or since. In poetry the great Elizabethan drama with Shakspere at its head, went on into the century without break. Poets, quaint and graceful, sacred and profane, belong more specially to the time. And if Shakspere goes on into this half-century, Milton begins in it, and really belongs to it. If his greatest poem was written after the Restoration, it is the fruit of the time before. For Milton lived and played his part in the days of the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate, and was as famous as a writer of political prose as he was of poetry, both religious and otherwise. His works show the impress of the Puritan religious movement brought to bear on a mind at once fresh with poetic fancy and rich with vast stores of learning. And both in Shakspere and Milton and in the literature of the time generally, whatever foreign influence there is is Italian. Italy had not yet wholly lost her place in Europe.