vania (July 9, 1755), and Washington and the provincial troops had to cover his retreat. All along the line of the colonies the Indian attacks only grew more terrible, the French telling LOUIS JOSEPH MONTCALM. the natives that the time had now come to drive the English from the soil. In Virginia, Washington wrote that the "supplicating tears of women and the moving petitions of the men melted him with deadly sorrow." Farther north, the French General Montcalm took fort after fort with apparent ease, allowing the gar risons, as at Fort William Henry, to be murdered by his Indians. "For God's sake," wrote the officer in command at Albany, to the Governor of Massachusetts, "exert yourself to save a province! New York itself may fall. Save a country! Prevent the downfall of the British government!" Dr. Jeremy Belknap, whom Bryant declares to have been the first person who made American history attractive, thus summed up the gloomy situation in the spring of 1757: "The great expense, the frequent disappointments, the loss of men, of forts, of stores, was very discourag ing. The enemy's country was filled with prisoners and scalps, private plunder and public stores, and provisions which our people, as beasts of burden, had conveyed to them. These reflections were the dismal accompaniment of the winter." What turned the scale was the energy of the new primeminister, William Pitt. Under his inspiration the colonies raised men "like magic," we are told; the home government furnishing arms, equip ments, and supplies; the colonies organizing, uniforming, and paying the troops, with a prospect of reimbursement. Events followed in quick succession. Abercrombie failed at Ticonderoga, but Bradstreet took Fort Frontenac; Prideaux took Niagara; Louisburg, Crown Point, and even Ticonderoga itself fell. Quebec was taken in 1759, Wolfe, the victor, and Montcalm, the defeated, dying alike almost in the hour when the battle was decided. Montreal soon followed; and in 1763 the Peace of Paris surrendered Canada. to the English, with nearly all the French possessions east of the Mississippi. France had already given up to Spain all her claims west of the Mississippi, and her brilliant career as an American power was over. With her the Indian tribes were also quelled, except that the brief conspiracy of Pontiac came and went like the last flicker of an expiring candle; then the flame vanished, and the Hundred Years' War was at an end. JAMES WOLFE. VIII. THE SECOND GENERATION OF ENGLISHMEN IN WHE AMERICA. HEN a modern American makes a pilgrimage, as I have done, to the English village church at whose altars his ancestors once ministered, he brings away a feeling of renewed wonder at the depth of conviction which led the Puritan clergy to forsake their early homes. The exquisitely peaceful features of the English rural landscape-the old Norman church, half ruined, and in this particular case restored by aid of the American descendants of that high-minded emigrant; the old burialground that surrounds it, a haunt of such peace as to make death seem doubly restful; the ancestral oaks; the rooks that soar above them; the flocks of sheep drifting noiselessly among the ancient gravestones-all speak of such tranquillity as the eager American must cross the Atlantic to obtain. No Englishman feels these things as the American feels them; the antiquity, as Hawthorne says, is our novelty. But beyond all the charm of the associations this thought always recurs—what love of their convictions, what devotion to their own faith, must have been needed to drive the educated Puritan clergymen from such delicious retreats to encounter the ocean, the forest, and the Indians! Yet there was in the early emigration to every American colony quite another admixture than that of learning and refinement; a sturdy yeoman element, led by the desire to better its condition and create a new religious world around it; and an adventurous element, wishing for new excitements. The popular opinion of that period did not leave these considerations out of sight, as may be seen by this London street ballad of 1640, describing the emigration: "Our company we feare not, there goes my Cosen Hanna, "Nay Tom Tyler is p'pared, and ye Smith as black as a cole, Then for the truth's sake goe." There were also traces, in the emigration, of that love of wandering, of athletic sports and woodcraft, that still sends young men of English race to the far corners of the earth. In the Virginia colonization this element was large, but it also entered into the composition of the Northern colonies. The sister of Governor Winthrop wrote from England, in 1637, of her son, afterwards Sir George Downing, that the boy was anxious to go to New England; and she spoke of the hazard. that he was in "by reson of both his father's and his owne strange inclination to the plantation sports." Upham accordingly describes this same youth in Harvard College, where he graduated in 1642, as shooting birds in the wild woods of Salem, and setting duck-decoys in the ponds. Life in the earlier days of the emigration was essentially a border life, a forest life, a frontier life-differing from such life in Australia or Colorado mainly in one wild dream which certainly added to its romance the dream that Satan still ruled the forest, and that the Indians were his agents. Whatever else may be said of the Puritan emigration, it represented socially and intellectually much of what was best in the mother country. Men whose life in England would have been that of the higher class of gentry might have been seen in New England taking with their own hands from the barrel their last measure of corn, and perhaps interrupted by the sight of a vessel arriving in the harbor with supplies. These men, who ploughed their own fields and shot their own venison, were men who had paced the halls of Emanuel College at Cambridge, who quoted Seneca in their journals of travel, and who brought with them books of classic literature among their works of theology. The library bequeathed by the Rev. John Harvard to the infant college at Cambridge included Homer, Pliny, Sallust, Terence, Juvenal, and Horace. The library bought by the commissioners from the Rev. Mr. Welde, for the Rev. Mr. Eliot, had in it Plutarch's Morals and the plays of Aristophanes. In its early poverty the colony voted £400 to found Harvard College, and that institution had for its second president a man so learned, after the fashion of those days, that he had the Hebrew Bible read to the students in the morning, and the Greek Testament in the afternoon, commenting on both extemporaneously in Latin. The curriculum of the institution was undoubtedly devised rather with a view to making learned theologians than elegant men of letters- thus much may be conceded to Mr. Matthew Arnold-but this was quite as much the case, as Mr. Mullinger has shown, in the English Cambridge of the seventeenth century. The year 1650 may be roughly taken as closing the first generation of the American colonists. Virginia had then been settled forty-three years, New York thirty-six, Plymouth thirty, Massachusetts Bay twenty-two, Maryland nineteen, Connecticut seventeen, Rhode Island fourteen, New Haven twelve, and Delaware twelve. A variety of industries had already been introduced, especially in the New England colonies. Boat-building had there begun, according to Colonel C. D. Wright, in 1624; |