The Reaction in England.

Frobisher or Drake, or themselves have borne arms under the famous admirals and captains, who, at her inspiration, had fought with a triumphant energy on sea and land.

The very temper which now strove to displace that earlier spirit only contributed to make it signal. Raleigh was beheaded October 29th, 1618; eleven years after Jamestown commenced, two years before the Mayflower's voyage. That was the last passionate blow of the vanquished Spain at the age of Elizabeth, whose energy and whose chivalry he represented. It showed the unsleeping animosity of the Spaniard ; but it also brought into startling exhibition the weakness and wickedness which were now on the throne from which the great daughter of Anne Boleyn had lately passed; and the spatter of his blood smote every heart, which was loyal to the Past, with pain and rage. Carlyle has suggested that Oliver Cromwell was perhaps at that time living in London, a student of law, and may have been a spectator of the scene. Many others, who were afterward in this country, must have seen the gallant and cultured man whose youthful grace had attracted Elizabeth, and whose life had imaged the splendor of the age; and a sharp sense of

thanked the Commons, in touching and dignified language, for their tender care of the general weal, brought back to herself the hearts of the people, and left to her successors a memorable example of the way in which it behooves a ruler to deal with public movements which he has not the means of resisting."

Macaulay: Hist. of England. Vol. I., page 63.

the Nemesis in history may well have startled them when the son and successor of the royal assassin bowed his reluctant and haughty head beneath the axe, in front of Whitehall.

The daring and inspiring spirit which had marked the preceding half-century was not destroyed, by the murder of one of its representatives, or by the treachery of another. A year after the landing at Plymouth, Thomas Wentworth, afterward known as Earl of Strafford, that 'great, brave, bad man,' whom Macaulay has pictured with a pencil so exquisite and so unrelenting, declared in Parliament, with vehement emphasis, that “the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament, are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England." That was then a passionate conviction in the House of Commons. Twenty years later, when he who then uttered it had been for twelve years its fierce antagonist, it caught him in its grasp, and swept him to the scaffold. The pre-Revolutionary struggle of our fathers had its prophecy in that sentence. seminal principle involved their whole contest.

Its

Before the Pilgrims sailed from Holland, he whom Elizabeth, forty years before, in the superb promise of his youth, had called her "young Lord Keeper," was Chancellor of England. His "Novum Organum might have come to our shores with Bradford and Carver; his later writings with Winthrop and Higginson. His immense influence on human thought syn

Shakespeare, and Milton.

chronises completely with the English settlements on our coast. The then new English version of the Scriptures was just in time to gild with its lights, of Hebrew story and Christian faith, the rude life on savage shores. Shakespeare had died, untimely, in 1616; and the first collected edition of his plays was published in the year of the settlement of this city. How far the impulse and renown of his genius had preceded his death we cannot be sure; but the children of those who had never read, who certainly had not seen his plays at the Blackfriars' or the Globe, have been debtors ever since to that supreme and visioned mind which reänimated the past, interpreted history, and searched the invisible spirit of man as if it were transparent crystal. Milton was a lad, twelve years old, when the Plymouth colony began, having been born, in 1608, in Bread street, London, under the armorial sign of the " Spread Eagle;" and his public life was wholly accomplished within the period now under review, though it was not till later that the "Paradise Lost was published in London, and the chequered and lofty life of the poet was closed in sleep.

These names make the age which presents them majestic. But their chief importance to us, at this moment, is derived from the fact that they represent a popular life which preceded themselves, and which quickened the personal genius that surpassed it. The authors were the fountain-shafts, through which shot up, in flashing leap, the waters flowing from distant

heights. With the various beauty, the incomparable force, of their differing minds, they gave expression to impalpable influences of which the age itself was full.

The same influences wrought in humbler men, who could not give them such expression. They were the vital inheritance of our fathers. The men of the English middle-class,—they were the men from the loins of whose peers, and whose possible associates, Raleigh, and Shakespeare, and Milton, had sprung. They could not, many of them, read the Latin of the "De Augmentis." They might not appreciate the cosmic completeness of Shakespeare's mind, or the marvellous beauty of Comus and L'Allegro. But they incorporated, more than others, the essential spirit of that prolific, prophetic age, which had found its voice in these supreme writers. They had breathed from infancy that invigorating air which was full of discovery, enterprise, hope, of widened learning, popular enthusiasm, a fresh and vivid Christian faith. They had felt the inrush of that vehement life which for sixty years had been sweeping over England; and the irrepressible temper of the time, which gave birth to the letters, impulse to the discovery, law to the statesmanship, life to the religion, of the age of Elizabeth, was as much a part of them as their bones and their blood.

They came, in large part, because they represented that spirit; because it seemed to them likely thenceforth to be less common and governing in England; and because they would rather encounter the seas, and

The Dutch, and Walloons.

face the perils and pains of the wilderness, than tarry in a country where James was king, and George Villiers was minister. When Endicott cut out the cross at Salem from the banner of England, he expressed a temper as old and as stubborn as the fights against Spain. When Wadsworth, fifty years later, seized the charter of Connecticut, and hid it in the Wyllys' oak, he did precisely what the English traditions of a century earlier had enjoined as his duty. And when the discerning Catholics of Maryland accepted religious freedom in their colony, they only expressed anew the spirit in which their fathers had fought the Armada, though the pontiff had blessed it, in their loyalty to a Queen against whom he had proclaimed a crusade.

It is never to be forgotten that that wonderful century, which saw at its beginning the coronation of Elizabeth, and at its end the death of Cromwell—the age of Grenville, Raleigh, Drake, of Bacon, Shakespeare, and the manhood of Milton-that was the century, in which the arts and arms of England, its resolute temper, and its sagacious and liberal life, were solidly planted upon these shores.

The powerful element brought from Holland, by the Dutch and the Walloons, was only the counterpart of this. An eminent American has made it familiar, in our time, to all who admire heroism in action, and eloquence in story.

Mr. Motley has said of William the Silent, that