numbers equal to any emergency, or they might have suffered the fate which attended the schemes of Coligni, and resulted in the American Huguenot dispersion. We have hinted what might have been the political consequences, had a lesser inflow or a larger ebb reduced their numbers very considerably. But what might not have been the worse alternative for England, had the emigration thence continued on the scale anticipated? Had it carried away an appreciable portion of the pith and sinew of the country, we might have been mourning to this very hour a fatal political hæmorrhage. Had the Long Parliament not met, or its Grand Remonstrance proved abortive-had the Five Members been seized --had a "thorough" policy prevailed by subtle degrees, and by the aid of a scared and wavering reaction-had Pym and Hampden ascended the scaffold in place of Laud and Charles the First had the fortunes of Marston Moor, or Naseby, or Dunbar, or Worcester been different to what they were,-to what a drain of its ablest and best might not England have been subjected? Had the exodus, as at one time contemplated, proceeded to its full extremity, what was to prevent her becoming what France became in consequence of the revocation of the edict of Nantes-a land emptied of its virtue and vigour as well as its austerities-a land from which the flower of its race was torn and of which the choicest aspirations were scattered to the winds-a land swept and garnished by a shortsighted tyranny for the vengeful demons of revolution to enter and take possession? THE NEW ENGLAND THEOCRACY. The New England Theocracy.-Phenomena of the "Wilderness," and their Influence. Omnipotence of the Elders. -The Massachusetts Code. - Child's Case.-Gorton's Case.-The Brethren heavier than the Bishops.- Persecu tion of Quakers.-Social Liberty shackled.-Marriage and Money-making. -Love of Creature Comforts.-Despotism of the Pulpit.-Beadles and Spectres. The Theocracy tottering.-The Witchcraft a Pretence.-Cotton Mather jubilant.-The Odious Result.-Contrast in other States. -Answer to the Apologists. It was the flower of a single generation, or less even than this, which launched the English, and laid the foundations of the American Republic. The results accomplished upon either shore were exponents of a common purpose, and, till subsequent events severed the connecting links, they may be said to have constituted a single history. For a season the objects contemplated were almost identical, and, to some extent, even the leaders were the same in both countries. But for a much longer term the magnates of New England were examples of the qualities and capacities which denoted the vigour of the type from which they were chiefly derived. That self-respect which is the root of so many manly virtues, a courage, an endurance, a love of liberty and homely order, with liberal inclinations to the culture of the higher faculties, and, above all, a supreme aptitude for the safe-conduct of their own interests, were theirs in perpetuity, as attributes of their progenitors. Whatever they did or undid was, to use the expression of Warburton, the work of "the greatest geniuses for government that ever existed," and it was a work which affiliates them to their true and rightful parents. If these parents succumbed to a necessary reaction, they, on the other hand, retained the option of exercising this capacity for government to the utmost, for they preserved down to our own time the fullest form of self-government which the world has ever witnessed. And the uses to which they applied it in the main atone for some obvious deficiencies; among others, for their submission to that crabbed Mumbo Jumbo, the spectre which was exorcised in England by the bonfires of 1660, but which continued to be potent there for more than one generation, and which acquired its sternest embodiment in the shape of a Puritan Theocracy. It is almost a moral problem how men so clearsighted in other respects could rivet the chains of their spiritual bondage and endure their theological fetters for so many years. In England the revolt against the reign of the Saints was no less speedy than its success was permanent. The reckless Secularism of the Restoration was subdued and refined in the reign of Anne, but the ground it recovered in a single day was never again altogether relinquished. But in America freedom in this sense came by painful processes, and there is something more than we can entirely fathom in the obduracy with which Puritanism there maintained its rigorous sway. It is true its colonists for the most part were of one religious temper, and they were exempt from foreign enticements or foreign correctives; but there must have been something besides, in the circumstances of their position, which tended to confirm their original bias, and to give such a special austerity to the communities they established. We conceive we can indicate some of these circumstances in the nature and novelty of the phenomena which surrounded them. It was the inclination of most of them, after a very few years, to look upon their settlements in the light of a home. Their "greatest ambition," as they stated to Charles II., was "to live a quiet life in a corner of the world;" and their expressions consequently manifest the sense of an enduring interest in the various objects they successively en THE PHENOMENA OF THE "WILDERNESS." 213 countered. Their terrors and privations are recounted in the style of men who had set their lives upon a single cast, whose hopes and desires were for ever bounded by the pathless woods and the desolate shore. At one time they bemoan the piercing cold; at another they gaze in terror at the Atlantic rolling beneath its unparalleled tempests; or they shudder with awe at the Northern Lights, which seem to their 66 eyes so bloody and fiery that they may be regarded as the heralds of the Second Advent."* At other times their impressions are of a more genial cast, exhilarated, for instance, by the "sweete cristall fountaines," which "jet most jocundly over the pebble stones," or refreshed by the great abundance of fruits "almost," they say, "as wild as the Indians."+ A great source of astonishment was the "ayerie regiment" of pigeons, having neither beginning nor ending of their millions, which joined together the pine-trees by their nests, and excluded from the earth the light of the sun. The seaserpent was already an exhibitor in public, for he was seen 'coiled up like a cable on a rock at Cape Anne."§ And there were presentiments, even then, of some Californian El Dorado, before the colonists had been twenty years in their settlement. Darby Field, for instance, brought report of certain White Hills with shining stones, "which induced many to travel thither to no purpose."|| Others, again, at the dictates of their terrors or imagination, peopled the interior with monstrous races, reproducing many of the extravagant fictions which are told in the earliest books on America. For a long time it was a matter of general belief that they were menaced by the most terrible wild beasts of the Old Continent. "Some likewise being lost in the woods, have heard such terrible roarings as have made them much aghast, which must either be devills or lyons." In fact, *New England's Plantation. New England's Prospect. + Id. § Josselyn's "Two Voyages to New England." Savage's "Winthrop." New England's Prospect. some of their maps contained in the corner the figures of lions or leopards, as of beasts native to the country. As might have been expected in these novel circumstances, the tendency to dwell upon the supernatural received an extraordinary encouragement. As colonists they conceived they had a stronger title to the intervention of particular providences, while they imagined that the fiends of the pit were in league against them, in order to discourage and baffle their enterprise. Occasionally they were cheered by mysterious tokens. As early as the year 1619, a blazing star in the west had announced their coming ;* while the Indians had been swept out of the circuit of their first settlement by the convenient mercy of an exterminating pestilence. At Watertown (July, 1632) was observed a combat between a mouse and a snake, in which the mouse conquered. The Rev. Mr. Wilson put his interpretation upon the phenomenon in the manner of an ancient Egyptian soothsayer. The snake, of course, was their enemy, the devil, the mouse, as obviously," the poor people who had come over." In a similar manner they obtained intimation of various dangers which threatened them from the Indians. Now it was the galloping of ghostly chargers, and now the whistling of invisible bullets, or an eclipse of the sun took the shape of a human scalp, or the more discerning beheld with consternation that the form of an Indian bow was delineated along the sky. From a throng of these supernatural incidents we select the following for what may have been its literary significance. Josselyn, in one of his voyages to New England, picked up a story of a Mr. Foxwell who, passing in a shallop along a barbarous strand, was wakened at midnight by a loud voice calling upon "Foxwell, Foxwell," to come on shore, and who at the same time beheld a great fire upon the sand, and men and women dancing round it in |