glimpse of Boston in 1663. "The buildings are handsome, joining one another as in London, with many large streets, most of them paved with pebble stone; in the high street towards the Common there are fair buildings, some of stone, and at the east end of the town one amongst the rest, built by the shore by Mr. Gibs a merchant, which it is thought will stand him in less than 30007. before it be fully finished. The town is not divided into parishes, yet they have three fair meeting houses or churches, which hardly suffice to receive the inhabitants and strangers that come in from all parts."

He next issued a brief work entitled, An Account of Two Voyages to New England.*

His books are mainly occupied with a view of the natural history of the country, but he occasionally gives us some hints of the inhabitants, and is uniformly amusing. He also published in 1674, Chronological Observations of America, from the year of the World to the year of Christ, 1673.

JOHN WILLIAMS,

Joby Gorkiams

THE anthor of the Redeemed Captive, was born at Roxbury, Massachusetts, December 16, 1664, where his grandfather had settled in the year 1638, on his emigration from England. By the aid of his maternal grandfather, William Park, he received a liberal education, and was graduated at Harvard at the age of nineteen. In the spring of 1686 he became the first minister of Deerfield. This was a post of unusual peril, as the place, then a frontier settlement, the first houses in which were erected in 1671, had suffered since 1675 continued attacks from the Indians engaged in King Philip's war. It was burnt by these savages after their slaughter of Captain Lathrop and his company, on the 18th of September, 1675, and the site was not again permanently occupied by the whites until 1682. In 1693, depredations recommenced. Attacks were made from time to time on the fort by parties of French and Indians, and on the 29th February (O.S.) 1704, the place was taken, destroyed by fire, some thirty-eight of the townspeople slain, and about one hundred carried into captivity, among whom were Mr. Williams, his wife (who was murdered on the route), and children. They were marched through the wilderness to Montreal, where they arrived about the end of March. They remained in Canada until October 25, 1706, when fifty-seven

were removed in a vessel sent from Boston to that city, where they arrived on the 21st of November following. A portion of the remainder had fallen from fatigue or violence on the march or died during their captivity, and some preferred to remain with their Indian captors. Williams with two of his children returned, and in the March following published his work on his captivity, one of the most interesting productions in our early literature.

He was invited immediately after his arrival to return to Deerfield, and, although the situation was still perilous, ventured on his old field of labor. Here he married a daughter of Captain Allen, of Windsor, Connecticut. The town had been rebuilt after its destruction in 1704, and was again attacked in 1709, but the assailants, finding the inhabitants prepared to give them a warm reception, withdrew. Soon after this Williams was appointed a commissioner in the expedition to Canada, under the command of Col. Stoddard, undertaken to redeem the prisoners yet remaining there. The attempt was successful in several instances, but not in obtaining the daughter of Mr. Williams. The remainder of his life was passed in comparative tranquillity, and he died at Deerfield, June 12, 1729, leaving eight children.

The Redeemed Captive has been frequently reprinted. The last edition (published by Hopkins, Bridgman & Co., Northampton, Mass.) is excellently edited with a life of the writer, to which we have been mainly indebted in the present sketch, and an account of his descendants by one of their number, Dr. Stephen W. Williams. We present a passage from the record of the perilous and painful journey.

We travelled not far the first day; God made the heathen so to pity our children, that though they had several wounded persons of their own to carry upon their shoulders, for thirty miles, before they came to the river, yet they carried our children, incapable of travelling, in their arms, and upon their shoulders. When we came to our lodging place, the first night, they dug away the snow, and made some wigwams, cut down some small branches of the spruce-tree to lie down on, and gave the prisoners somewhat to eat; but we had but little appetite. I was pinioned and bound down that night, and so I was every night whilst I was with the army. Some of the enemy who brought drink with them from the town fell to drinking, and in their drunken fit they killed my negro man, the only dead person I either saw at the town, or in the way.

In the night an Englishman made his escape; in the morning (March 1), I was called for, and ordered by the general to tell the English, that if any more made their escape, they would burn the rest of the prisoners. He that took me was unwilling to let me speak with any of the prisoners, as we marched; but on the morning of the second day, he being ap pointed to guard the rear, I was put into the hands of my other master, who permitted me to speak to my wife, when I overtook her, and to walk with her

• The Redeemed Captive returning to Zion: or a faithful history of remarkable occurrences in the captivity and deliverance of Mr. John Williams, Minister of the Gospel in Decrfield, who in the desolation which befel that plantation by an incur slon of the French and Indians, was by them carried away. with his family and his neighbourhood, Into Canada. Drawn up by himself

to help her in her journey. On the way, we discourse of the happiness of those who had a right to an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens; and God for a father and friend; as also, that it was our reasonable duty quietly to submit to the will of God, and to say, "The will of the Lord be done." My wife told me her strength of body began to fail, and that I must expect to part with her; saying, she hoped God would preserve my life, and the life of some, if not of all our children with us; and commended to me, under God, the care of them. She never spake any discontented word as to what had befallen us, but with suitable expressions justified God in what had happened. We soon made a halt, in which time my chief surviving master came up, upon which I was put upon marching with the foremost, and so made my last farewell of my dear wife, the desire of my eyes, and companion in many mercies and afflictions. Upon our separation from each other, we asked for each other grace sufficient for what God should call us to. After our being parted from one another, she spent the few remaining minutes of her stay in reading the Holy Scriptures; which she was wont personally every day to delight her soul in reading, praying, meditating on, by herself, in her closet, over and above what she heard out of them in our family worship. I was made to wade over a small river, and so were all the English, the water above knee deep, the stream very swift; and after that to travel up a small mountain; my strength was almost spent, before I came to the top of it. No sooner had I overcome the difficulty of that ascent, but I was permitted to sit down, and be unburdened of my pack. I sat pitying those who were behind, and entreated my master to let me go down and help my wife; but he refused, and would not let me stir from him. I asked each of the prisoners (as they passed by me) after her, and heard that, passing through the above-said river, she fell down, and was plunged over head and ears in the water; after which she travelled not far, for at the foot of that mountain, the cruel and blood-thirsty savage who took her slew her with his hatchet at one stroke, the tidings of which were very awful. And yet such was the hard-heartedness of the adversary, that my tears were reckoned to me as a reproach. My loss and the loss of my children was great; our hearts were so filled with sorrow, that nothing but the comfortable hopes of her being taken away, in mercy to herself, from the evils we were to see, feel, and suffer under, (and joined to the assembly of the spirits of just men made perfect, to rest in peace, and joy unspeakable and full of glory, and the good pleasure of God thus to exercise us,) could have kept us from sinking under, at that time. That Scripture, Job i. 21, "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord,”—was brought to my mind, and from it, that an afflicting God was to be glorified; with some other places of Scripture, to persuade to a patient bearing my afflictions.

We were again called upon to march, with a far heavier burden on my spirits than on my back. I begged of God to overrule, in his providence, that the corpse of one so dear to me, and of one whose spirit he had taken to dwell with him in glory, might meet with a Christian burial, and not be left for meat to the fowls of the air and beasts of the earth, a mercy that God graciously vouchsafed to grant. For God put it into the hearts of my neighbors, to come out as far as she lay, to take up her corpse, carry it to the town, and decently to bury it soon after. In our march they killed a sucking in

fant of one of my neighbors; and before night a girl of about eleven years of age. I was made to mourn, at the consideration of my flock being, so far, a flock of slaughter, many being slain in the town, and so many murdered in so few miles from the town; and from fears what we must yet expect, from such who delightfully imbrued their hands in the blood of so many of His people. When we came to our lodging place, an Indian captain from the eastward spake to my master about killing me, and taking off my scalp. I lifted up my heart to God, to implore his grace and mercy in such a time of need; and afterwards I told my master, if he intended to kill me, I desired he would let me know of it; assuring him that my death, after a promise of quarter, would bring the guilt of blood upon him. He told me he would not kill me. We laid down and slept, for God sustained and kept us.

Mr. S. G. Drake, of Boston, has preserved in his Indian Captivities, and Book of the Indians, a number of original narratives, of a character similar to that of Williams, forming a collection of much historical value. These will always retain their place in popular interest, but from their necessary resemblance of subject and treatment to the "Redeemed Captive," do not call for separate notice.

JOHN LEDERER,

JOHN LEDERER, the first explorer of the Alleganies, prepared an account of his Three several Marches from Virginia to the west of Carolina and other parts of the continent, begun in March, 1669, and ended in September, 1670;* in Latin, which was translated by Sir William Talbot, and published in 1672. The address to the reader, by Talbot, informs us,

That a stranger should presume (though with Sir William Berkly's commission) to go into those parts of the American continent where Englishmen never had been, and whither some refused to accompany him, was, in Virginia, looked on as so great an însolence, that our traveller, at his return, instead of welcome and applause, met nothing but affronts and reproaches; for, indeed, it was their part that forBook him in the expedition, to procure him discredit that was a witness to theirs. Therefore no industry was wanting to prepare men with a prejudice against him, and this their malice improved to such a general animosity, that he was not safe in Virginia from the outrage of the people, drawn into a persuasion, that the public levy of that year went all to the expense of his vagaries. Forced by this storm into Maryland, he became known to me, though then ill affected to the man, by the stories that went about of him. Nevertheless, finding him, contrary to my expectation, a modest, ingenious per son, and a pretty scholar, I thought it common justice to give him an occasion of vindicating himself from what I had heard of him; which truly he did, with so convincing reason and circumstance as quite abolished those former impressions in me, and made me desire this account of his Travels,

Lederer does not appear in either of his expeditions to have penetrated further than, in his

The Discoveries of John Lederer, in three several marches from Virginia, to the west of Carolina, and other parts of the continent: begun in March 1669, and ended in September 1670. Together with A general Map of the whole Territory which be traversed. Collected and Translated out of Latine, from his Discourse and Writings, by Sir William Talbot, Baronet, London: printed by J. O., for Samuel Høyrick, 1672.

own words, "to the top of the Apalataan mountains." His tract contains but twenty-seven quarto pages, a portion of which is filled with accounts of the Indians. His "Conjectures of the Land beyond the Apalatœan Mountains" are curious:

They are certainly in a great error, who imagine that the continent of North America is but eight or ten days' journey over from the Atlantic to the Indian ocean: which all reasonable men must acknowledge, if they consider that Sir Francis Drake kept a west-north-west course from Cape Mendocino to California. Nevertheless, by what I gathered from the stranger Indians at Akenatzy, of their voyage by sea to the very mountains from a far distant north-west country, I am brought over to their opinion who think that the Indian ocean does stretch an arın or bay from California into the continent, as far as the Apalataan mountains, auswerable to the gulfs of Florida and Mexico on this side. Yet I am far from believing with some, that such great and navigable rivers are to be found on the other side of the Apalatoans falling into the Indian ocean, as those which run from them to the eastward. My first reason is derived from the knowledge and experience we already have of South America, whose Andes send the greatest rivers in the world (as the Amazon and the Rio de la Plata, &c.) into the Atlantick, but none at all into the Pacifique Sea. Another argument is, that all our waterfowl, which delight in lakes and rivers, as swans, geese, ducks, &c., come over the mountains from the lake of Canada, when it is frozen over every winter, to our fresh rivers: which they would never do, could they find any on the other side of the Apalatœaus.*

FRANCIS KNAPP.

FRANCIS KNAPP, the son of George Knapp, of Chilton, in Berkshire, was born in the year 1672, and matriculated at St. John's college, Oxford.† His father, a captain in the British navy, commanded a ninety-gun ship on the American coast in the early part of the last century. The son came to America to take possession of some lands acquired by his grandfather at Watertown, near Boston, where he passed the remainder of his life, engaged in the quiet pursuits of a scholar. He was a composer of music, and the author of a poctical Epistle to Mr. B., reprinted in J. Nichols's "Select Collection of Poems, 1780," and of a poetical address to Mr. Pope, on his Windsor Forest, dated June 7, 1715, which appears among the commendatory poems prefixed to the first and subsequent editions of that poet's works. It is claimed by Samuel L. Knapp, in his American Biography, as an American production, but in a note by William Roscoe to his edition of Pope, is said to have been written in Killala, Mayo county, Ireland.

The Epistle in Nichols is a well-penned satire on the author tribe, with an ungenerous fling at

"A Mapp of Virginia discovered to ye Hills" 1651, makes the distance less than three hundred miles from the southernmost cape of Delaware to "the Sea of China, and the Indies." The author of "A Perfect Description of Virginia," sent from Virginia at the request of a gentleman of worthy note, who desired to know the true state of Virginia as it now stands, reprinted in Vol. ix. of the Second Series Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., has a similar opinion with Lederer as to rivers running west from the Allegantes, Account by John Penington, of Plantagenet's New Albion. Penn. Ilist, Memoirs, Vol. iv. pt, 1. Wood's Ath. Oxon., Ed. Bliss,

Wesley, and a humorous preference of Rymer over Dryden, while the author deprecates an act of parliament which should restrain the race of poetasters.

I grant you, such a course as this might do
To make thein humbly treat of what they know,
Not venturing further than their brains will go.
But what should I do then, for ever spoil'd
Of this diversion which frail authors yield?
I should no more on Dunton's counter meet,
Bards that are deeply skill'd in rhyme and feet;
For I am charm'd with easy nonsense more,
Than all the wit that men of sense adore.
With fear I view great Dryden's hallow'd page,
With fear I view it, and I read with rage.
I'm all with fear, with grief, and love possest,
Tears in my eyes, and anguish in my breast,
While I with mourning Anthony repiue:
And all the hero's miseries ure mine.
If I read Edgar, then my soul's at peace,
Lull'd in a lazy state of thoughtless ease.
No passion's ruffled by the peaceful lay,
No stream, no depth, to hurry me away;
Rymer in both professions harmless proves,
Nor wounds when critic, nor when poet moves.

The lines prefixed to Pope announce a man of wit and taste, by whose presence Watertown should have been the gainer.

Hail, sacred Bard! a Muse unknown before
Salutes thee from the bleak Atlantic shore.
To our dark world thy shining page is shown,
And Windsor's gay retreat becomes our own.
The Eastern pomp had just bespoke our care,
And India poured her gaudy treasures here:
A various spoil adorned our naked land,
The pride of Persia glittered on our strand,
And China's Earth was cast on common sand:
Tossed up and down the glossy fragments lay,
And dressed the rocky shelves, and paved the painted

bay.

Thy treasures next arrived: and now we boast
A nobler cargo on our barren coast:
From thy luxuria t Forest we receive
More lasting glories than the East can give.

Where'er we dip in thy delightful page,
What pompous scenes our busy thoughts engage!
The pompous scenes in all their pride appear,
Fresh in the page, as in the grove they were.
Nor half so true the fair Lodona shows

The sylvan state that on her border grows,
While she the wandering shepherd entertains
With a new Windsor in her watery plaius;
Thy juster lays the lucid wave surpass,
The living scene is in the Muse's glass.
Nor sweeter notes the echoing forests cheer,
When Philomela sits and warbles there,
Than when you sing the greens and opening glades,
And give us Harmony as well as Shades:
A Titian's hand might draw the grove,
but you
Can paint the grove, and add the music too."

In the New England Weekly Journal for June 28, 1731, we have met with a poem, hitherto unnoticed, descriptive of Watertown, worthy of Knapp's pen-of which the reader may judge by a few passages, marking an early and true employment of American incidents:

A NEW ENGLAND POND.

Of ancient streams presume no more to tell,
The fam'd Castalian or Pierian well,
Fresh-pond superior, must those rolls confess,
As much as Cambridge yields to Rome or Greece;

More limpid water can no fountain show, A fairer bottom or a smoother brow;

A painted world its peaceful gleam contains
The heavenly arch, the bord'ring groves and plains:
Here in mock silver Cynthia seems to roll,
And trusty pointers watch the frozen pole.
Here sages might observe the wand'ring stars,
And rudest swains commence astrologers:
Along the brin the lovely plover stalks
And to his visionary fellow talks:
Amid the wave the vagrant blackbird sees,
And tries to perch upon the imag'd trees;
On flying clouds the simple bullocks gaze
Or vainly reach to crop the shad'wy grass;
From nerbring hills the stately horse espies
Himself a feeding and himself envies.
Hither pursu'd by op'ning hounds the hare
Blesses himself to see a forest near,
The waving shrubs he takes for real wood,
And boldly plunges in the yielding flood.
On this side willows hem the basin round,
There graceful trees the promontory crown,
Whose mingled tufts and outspread arms compose
A shade delightful to the laurell'd brows;
Here mossy couches tempt to pleasing dreams
The love sick soul, and ease the weary limbs:-
No noxious snake disperses poison here,
Nor screams of night bird rend the twilight air.
Excepting him who when the groves are still,
Hums am'rous tunes and whispers whip-poor-will,
To hear whose carol elves in circles trip,
And lovers' hearts within their bosoms leap,
Whose savage notes the troubled mind amuse,
Banish despair, and hold the falling dews.
No ghastly horrors conjure tho'ts of woe,
Or dismal prospects to the fancy show.

BIRDS AND FISHES

:

Hither ye bards for inspiration come,
Let every other fount but this be dumb.
Which way soe'er your airy genius leads,
Receive your model from these vocal shades.
Wou'd you in homely pastoral excel,
Take pattern from the merry piping quail;
Observe the blue-bird for a roundelay,
The chattering pye or ever babbling jay.
The plaintive dove the soft love verse can teach,
Aud mimic thrush to imitators preach.

In Pindar's strain the lark salutes the dawn,
The lyric robin chirps the evening on.
For poignant satire mind the mavis well,
And hear the sparrow for a madrigal.
For ev'ry sense a pattern here you have,
From strains heroie down to humble stave.
Not Phœbus' self, altho' the God of verse,
Could hit such fine and entertaining airs;
Nor the fair maids who round the fountain sate,
Such artless heav'nly music modulate.
Each thicket seems a Paradise renew'd,
The soft vibrations fire the moving blood.
Each sense its part of sweet delusion shares,
The scenes bewitch the eye, the song the ears.
Pregnant with scent each wind regales the smell,
Like cooling sheets th' enwrapping breezes feel.
During the dark, if poets' eyes we trust,
These lawns are haunted by some swarthy ghost.
Some Indian prince who, fond of former joys,
With bow and quiver thro' the shadow plies;
He can't in death his native grove forget,
But leaves Elyzium for his ancient seat.
O happy pond, hadst thou in Grecia flow'd,
The bounteous blessing of some watry God,
Or had some Ovid sung this liquid rise,
Distill'd, perhaps, from slighted Virgil's eyca
Well is thy worth in Indian story known,

Thy living lymph and fertile borders shown,
Thy various flocks the cover'd shore can shun,
Drove by the fowler and the fatal gun.
Thy shining roach and yellow bristly breme,
The pick'rel, rav'nous monarch of the stream,
The perch, whose back a ring of colours shows,
The horny pout, who courts the slimy ooze,
The eel serpentine, some of dubious race,
The tortoise with his golden spotted case;.
Thy hairy musk 'rat, whose perfume defies
The balmy odour of Arabian skies;

The throng of Harvard know thy pleasures well,
Joys too extravagant, perhaps, to tell;
Hither ofttimes the learned tribe repair,
When Sol returning warms the glowing year.

BENJAMIN COLMAN.

BENJAMIN COLMAN was born in Boston, Oct. 19, 1673. He entered " young and small" into the school of Ezekiel Cheever, by whom he was prepared for Harvard college, where he was graduated in 1692. He began to preach in the following year at Medford, near Boston, and in 1695, embarked for England. The mother country was then at war with France, and the ship was attacked by a French privateer. Mr. Colman took a gallant part in her defence, and "was exposed all the while on the quarter-deck, where four out of seven were wounded, and one mortally. He was much praised for his courage when the fight was over; but though he charged and discharged like the rest, yet he declared he was sensible of no courage, but of a great deal of fear, and when they had received two or three broadsides, he wondered when his courage would coine, as he had heard others talk. In short, he fought like a philosopher and a Christian."* The vessel was captured, and all on board taken to France, where Mr. Colman was for some time imprisoned, until an exchange of prisoners between the two belligerents enabled him to visit England, where he preached several times with great success, and gained the friendship of Bates, Calamy, Howe, and other leading dissenting ministers. He was urged to remain in London, but in 1699 receiving a call from a number of leading citizens of Boston, who had built the Brattle street church, to become their first minister, he accepted it, and consequently returned to Boston, where he arrived "after a long eight weeks' sick passage,' on the first of November. The congregation was formed in opposition to the Cambridge platform, and the remaining churches of Boston refused, for some years, to hold communion with its minister. He continued his connexion with the congregation until his death in 1747, preaching to them on the last Sunday of his life. He was held in great esteem as a pulpit orator, received the degree of D.D. from the University of Glasgow in 1731, and a large number of his sermons were published. In 1724 he was elected president of Harvard college, but declined the office. He was however, a good friend to the institution, and also to Yale, procuring for both many donations from his English as well as American friends. He was thrice married and left a numerous family. The Rev. Ebenezer Turell, who married his daughter in 1749, published a life of her father, froin

Life by the Rev. Ebenezer Turell, p. 6. + Ellot's Blog. Diet,

which the materials of this sketch have been derived. It forms a quarto volume of over two hundred pages, and deserves high commendation among American biographies. Dr. Colinan wrote a short poem, Elijah's Translation, on the death of the Rev. Samuel Willard, 1707, and a few occasional verses and poetical epistles are preserved in his life. He also wrote a tract in favor of inoculation for the small-pox, in 1721.

ELIJAH'S ASCENSION.

Twas at high noon, the day serene and fair,
Mountains of luminous clouds rolled in the air,
When on a sudden, from the radiant skies,
Superior light flashed in Elisha's eyes;

The heavens were cleft, and from th' imperial throne
A stream of glory, dazzling splendor shone:
Beams of ten thousand suns shot round about,
The sun and every blazoned cloud went out:
Bright hosts of angels lined the heavenly way,
To guard the saint up to eternal day.
Then down the steep descent, a chariot bright,
And steeds of fire, swift as the beams of light.
Winged seraphs ready stood, bowed low to greet
The favorite saint, and hand him to his sent.
Enthroned he sat, transformed with joys his mien,
Calm his gay soul, and like his face serene.
His eye and burning wishes to his God,
Forward he bowed, and on the triumph rode.
Saluted, as he passed the heavenly cloud,
With shouts of joy, and hallelujalis loud.
Ten thousand thousand angel-trumpets sound,
And the vast realms of heaven all echoed round.

TO URANIA ON THE DEATH OF HER FIEST AND ONLY CHILD,

Why mourns my beauteous friend bereft
Her Saviour and her heaven are left:
Her lovely babe is there at rest,
In Jesus' arms embraced and blest.

Would you, Urania, wish it down
From you bright Throne and shining Crown?
To your cold arins and empty breast,
Could Heaven indulge you the request;
Your bosom's neither warm nor fair,
Compared with Abraham's: leave it there.
He the famed father of the just,
Beheld himself but earth and dust,
Before the will of God most high,
And bid his darling Isaac die.

When Heaven required in sacrifice
The dear desire of his eyes;
And more to prove his love commands
The offering from the Father's hands;
See how th illustrious parent yields,
And seeks Moriah's mournful fields.

He bound his lovely only child
For death; his soul serene and mild,
He reached his hand, and grasped the knife,
To give up the devoted life.

Less Heaven demands of thee, my friend;
And less thy faith shall recommend.
All it requires is to resign,

To Heaven's own act and make it thine,
By silence under discipline.

The least we to our Maker owel
The least, Urania, you did vow!
The least that was your Saviour's claim,
When o'er your babe his glorious Name
Was called in awful Baptism! Then
You gave it back to Heaven again.

You freely owned that happy hour,
Heaven's right, propriety, and power,
The loan at pleasure to resume,
And call the pretty stranger home.
A witness likewise at its birth

I stood, that hour of joy and mirth:
I saw your thankful praises rise,
And flow from pleased, uplifted eyes
With raised devotion, one accord,
We gave the infant to its Lord.

And think, Urania, ere that day,
While the fair fruit in secret lay,
Unseen, yet loved within the womb
(Which also might have been its tomb).
How oft, before it blest your sight,
In secret prayers, with great delight,
You did recognize Heaven's right.

Now stand by these blest acts, my friend;
Stand firmly by them to the end.
Now you are tried, repeat the act;
Too just, too glorious to retract.
Think, dear Urania, how for thee,
God gave his only Son to be
An offering on the cursed tree.

Think, how the Son of God on earth
(The spotless Virgin's blessed birth),
Our lovely babes took up and blest,
And them high heirs of Heaven confest!

Think, how the blest of Woman stood, While impious hands, to the cursed wood, Nailed down her only Son and God!

Learn hence, Urania, to be dumb!
Learn thou the praise that may become
Thy lighter grief, which Heaven does please
To take such wondrous ways to ease.

Adore the God who from thee takes
No more than what he gives and makes:
And means in tenderest love the rode
To serve to thy eternal good.

WILLIAM BYRD.

IN 1841, Edmund Ruffin, of Virginia, prepared for the press and published a volume entitled The Westover Manuscripts.* It was the produc tion of a gentleman once much celebrated in the Old Dominion, whose story cannot be better told for our purpose than in the distinguished recital of the inscription upon the monument which covers his remains in the garden of his once splendid Estate of Westover, on the north bank of James River. "Here lieth the Honorable William Byrd, Esq., being born to one of the amplest fortunes in this country, he was sent early to England for his education; where, under the care and direction of Sir Robert Southwell, and ever favoured with his particular instructions, he made a happy proficiency in polite and various learning. By the means of the same noble friend, he was introduced to the acquaintance of many of the first persons of that age for knowledge, wit, virtue, birth, or high station, and particularly contracted a most intimate and bosom friendship with the learned and illustrious Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery. He was called to the bar in the Middle Temple, studied for some time in the Low Countries, visited the court of France, and was chosen Fellow of the Royal Society. Thus eminently fitted for the service and ornament of his country, he was made receiver general of his majesty's revenues here, was thrice appointed public agent to the court and ministry of England, and

The Westover Manuscripts: containing the History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina; a Journey to the Land of Eden, A.D. 1788; and a Progress to the Mines, Written from 1728 to 1786, and now first published. By Wil Ham Byrd, of Westover. Petersburg: Printed by Edmund and Julian C. Rufin. 1841. Large 8vo. pp. 143.