The government, soon after the breaking out of the civil war, took measures to fortify unprotected points on the coast. One of these was the mouth of the Kennebec River. It was proper that the work there commenced should have a name. History was ransacked for this purpose, and Mr. Poor's pet theory, which up to this time had been coolly received by the more prominent members of the Maine Historical Society, suddenly came into favor. The name of "Fort Popham" was suggested to the government, and accepted. A celebration was arranged in honor of the event, and a memorial-stone prepared for insertion in the wall of the new fort. This stone, which sets forth, with other pleasant historical fallacies, that a colony was founded here in 1607, and which was laid, we read in the "Memorial," with the full and impressive ritual of the Maine Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, many a visitor at Fort Popham has been puzzled to find. The last we heard of the stone, it was turned with its face to the wall against a wood-shed.

The means by which the spot was identified were furnished in a volume published by the Hakluyt Society of London, entitled "The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, by William Strachey, Gent., the first Secretary of the Colony: edited by R. H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum." The eighteen concluding pages of this volume treat of " a colonie sent out to settle within the river of Sachadehoc, by the Hon. Sir John Popham, Knight, Lord Chief Justice," etc. Strachey was secretary of the South Virginia Colony, and came over to Jamestown; but he was not personally cognizant of what he records concerning the Popham Colony. Fourteen of the eighteen pages comprise a journal of incidents, with their dates, from July 27 to October 6, 1607, which, if authentic, must have been the work of some other hand; but whose the writer gives no intimation. The preliminary and concluding portions are Strachey's own, and the narrative was probably written about the year 1616. This paper gives substantially the same facts, but more in detail, which were already known from the old chroniclers, and such additional information as enabled the Maine Historical Society to fix with some degree of certainty the spot where the landing was made. Under the date of August 18 (O. S.) the journal says:

"They all went ashore, and there made choise of a place for their plantacion, at the mouth or entry of the ryver on the west side (for the river bendeth yt self towards the nor-east and by east), being almost an island, of a good bignes, being in a province called by the Indians Sabino.

19. They all went ashoare where they had made choise of their plantation, and where they had a sermon delivered unto them by their preacher; and after the sermon, the president's commission was read, with the lawes to be observed and kept."

We have here a full and satisfactory explanation why Popham celebrations were not held before 1862, and why they have been held since. What could have been more absurd than to talk, before a grave assembly of students of history, of "hallowed ground," "sacred spot," and "the great event of American history," when nobody could make even a reasonable guess as to where the great event took place? Judge Sullivan, we have seen, supposed that the colonists spent their "miserable winter" on Stage Island. Horsecatch Point was the place. Any person who objects to these annual celebrations must have taken a perpetual vow against innocent amusements, a day at the seaside, or a clam-bake.

8.- Cape Cod and all along Shore: Stories. By CHARLES NORDHOFF. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1868. pp. 235.

WE cordially commend these stories for their manliness of tone and freshness of material. The characters in most of them are drawn from our Cape Cod fishermen, and the vividness of the portraits shows clearly that they are from the life. The author has smelt salt-water in his day, and his sailors are not the imaginary beings who spend their time in hitching their trousers, squirting tobacco-juice, and talking a dialect never heard on land or sea. He has evidently seen the manners he paints from a nearer point of view than his writing-desk. Uncle Shubael's page of proverbs, in "Captain Tom," has that unmistakable game-flavor that is beyond the skill of literary chemistry. "Ye can't make a fog-horn out of a pig's tail; the squeal ain't in that end, ye know," is as genuine as any of Sancho Panza's; and we cannot help wishing that Mr. Nordhoff, who could do it so well, would give us a collection of these 'long-shore apophthegms. Some of the stories show a real originality in conception and treatment. "Mehetabel Rogers's Cranberry Swamp" strikes us as especially good; and it is an immense comfort to get out of the company which the novels force upon us, and to find ourselves once more with real men and women, who bleed, if you prick them, and have something more neighborly about them than ideal sentiments and ethics. The spirit in which Mr. Nordhoff writes is so healthy, and he suggests a good moral so well without preaching, that we hope he will soon give us some more stories as sound in quality and as pleasant to read as these.

9.- Hans Breitmann's Party. And other Ballads. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers. 1868. 12mo. pp. 32.

THE old English dramatists seem to have reckoned securely on a laugh, when they brought in a character who spoke broken English, though Shakespeare was the only man of them who made a really comic character in this way out of Fluellen. Hazlitt had a notion that the English were more sensitive to this kind of fun than other nations; but he did not know that the Spaniards had their Biscayans, Moors, and negroes, and the French their Gascon, who amused them in the same way. The little volume before us is one of the most successful of its kind. Not only has the author caught the accent of German-English, but he has caught it as no one but a thorough German scholar could have done; and he shows as great a familiarity with the literature as with the idiom of the language. One of the most comical of the ballads is a ludicrous parody of the Hildebrand-lied, at which we could not help laughing, though we shuddered at its audacity. Without being profoundly humorous, the volume is excellent fun, and all the more entertaining that it aims at nothing more. There is real wit in it, and sometimes of a very subtile kind,—as where he says of the Turners, that there was "only von Sharman" among them, "und he vas a Holstein Dane." But we should say it was the author's highest praise, that his mind was able to play with his subject, – an achievement almost unprecedented among American authors. The book has no tendency whatever; and any reader, whatever his opinions, may find the medicine of an honest laugh in it.

10. If, Yes, and Perhaps. Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations, with some Bits of Fact. By EDWARD E. HALE. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1868. 16mo. pp. 296.

THERE is no better company than a parson who is at the same time a man of this world; so many of them are men altogether, we will not say of the, but of some other world, whose language is foreign to us, and whose kingdom we trust will never come, - a world quite incredibly inhuman, the creation of a bilious Tract Society, where our bill of fare shall be regulated by dyspeptic colporteurs, and where we shall read endless "Shepherds of Salisbury Plain" and "Dairyman's Daughters," whenever we are not writing letters to Mrs. Hannah More, or her American copy in water-colors, Miss Hannah Adams.

Mr. Hale has the great advantage of being able to speak our language, the very mother tongue of the heathen whom he proposes to convert ; and we should say that it supplied him with what Archimedes and a number of honest people after him have devoutly wished for, a place to stand on, where he can get a purchase on his hearers, and therefore indulge some reasonable hope of moving them. He is one of the very best magazinists in the country; we might call him the best, if we could forget Dr. Holmes and Colonel Higginson. He has the rare gift of a light touch, and does not, like so many of our writers, betray a want of training, by bearing on too hard, and making all his strokes of the same laborious thickness. Beyond this, he has so easy a way of making a story seem natural, by little matter-of-fact touches, that a justly outraged religious public has actually turned upon him for doing his business too well, as if it were not a story-teller's duty to take us in, if he can. His "Man without a Country," the cleverest story that ever appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," unless we should give that praise to "My Double, and how he undid me," was supposed by many well-meaning persons to be a narrative of fact; and they felt themselves wronged, when they found it to be a fiction, instead of being thankful, as they should have been, that somebody could make fiction as good a liar as fact commonly is, and thus put their credulity on its guard. The story conveyed an admirable moral pleasantly disguised; and if facts are useful to us in any other way, we have read history without profit. Indeed, Mr. Hale has generally an adroit way of getting his morals into us without our knowing it, and yet without any sugar-coating. But we confess we prefer to be simply amused, as in "My Double" and "The South American." Mr. Hale seems to imply that these have been taxed with extravagance; but for ourselves we wish we could have as much as possible more of this extravagance guarded by good taste. Of extravaganza we have had, perhaps, more than enough in America. Mr. Hale would be incapable of this, for he is a man of culture, as he shows in fifty pleasant little ways; and he understands that the ideal is not the stilted, but merely the real set in an unexpected light. We should say that his stories compared with others as good vers de société with more serious verse, less solemn, but more clever, — better to take, as they say.

INDEX

TO THE

HUNDRED AND SEVENTH VOLUME

OF THE

North American Re v i e w .