after by their friends with painful earnestness and wonder; and, at each successive ship that left with pilgrim passengers to her shores, the admiration and amazement of men increased, that not of the poor, the unfortunate, or the lowly were these voluntary exiles, but rather, in the majority of instances, the most refined and accomplished examples of the civilisation of the age. Not alone the scholar and the philosopher, but the wealthy, the high born, and the nobly bred, were thus seen willingly abandoning the classic quiet, the splendour, the refinement of their homes, urged and sustained by those grand designs and hopes which, having told them that mankind were born for a better system of government, and a purer shape of society, than existed in the Old World, now pointed out to them an opportunity of testing these exalted aspirations in the new and strange lands which had started up so suddenly beyond the vast and dismal ocean. The work, thus begun by pure philanthropists, was carried out to an extraordinary extent by Laud's terrible system of church government; and, for many months before Vane so suddenly formed his resolution of exile, successive multitudes of sufferers for the conscience' sake had been driven from their native country to take refuge in New England, as the last home that was left for religion or for liberty.

In glancing at the infancy of the American colonies, even thus briefly, several considerations of great interest suggest themselves as to the peculiar forms and habits of society which were of necessity incident to that early state, and the intellectual influences which again, as a matter of course, sprang out of these forms. It will be a matter of importance to follow them, as far as we may, in their probable or possible effects upon the mind of Vane. The extraordinary spectacle of two extreme points of human progress brought back into direct contact, which awaited his landing on the American shores, could hardly be presented to such a mind without an effect scarcely less extraordinary. There he had to see

a reunion of the city and the wilderness, a junction in the same men of the habits which belong to the highest advances of refinement and to the most rude and primitive condition of humanity. In log-houses he would have to seek, not vainly, the most studiously polished manners of civilisation; for "the same person whose evenings were spent in the studies of philosophy, learning, and religion, was engaged during the day in the midst of the forest, or floating in a bark canoe;" toiling in labours which were the occupations of the rudest and most barbarous ages, the employments of the period when

"Nature first made man,

And wild in woods the noble savage ran."

Vane was not suffered to depart without many peevish remonstrances from his father: but it is said the king interfered at last, and intimated a wish for the absence of the young republican.†

A characteristic circumstance awaited his presence on board the passage ship. The puritans and nonconformists already assembled for the same distant voyage, instead of welcoming their illustrious fellow exile, shrank from him with coldness and suspicion. He was the son of a minister of the king; he had a face that beamed with lustrous imagination; and he wore long hair! "His honourable birth," says his friend Sikes, "long hair, and other circumstances of his person, rendered his fellow-travellers jealous of him, as a spye to betray their liberty, rather than any way like to advantage their design." The old, vulgar, and neverfailing resource, when we can find no better objection to a man! Clarendon has a remark of the same kind in his history: "Sir Harry Vane had an unusual aspect, which, though it might naturally proceed both from his father and mother, neither of which were beautiful persons, yet made men think there was somewhat in

Upham's American Biography.

+Neal's History of New England, vol. i. p. 144. Neal adds, that Vane's design," as he pretended," was to begin a settlement on the banks of the river Connecticut. And see Mather, book iii. p. 77.

him of extraordinary; and his whole life made good that imagination.” * A few short and pithy words out of Sikes's rhapsody furnish no bad result to that style of objection in the case of the puritan voyagers:"But he that they thought at first sight to have too little of Christ for their company, did soon after appear

to have too much for them."

Vane landed at Boston, in New England, in 1635, and was admitted to the freedom of Massachusetts on the 3d of March in the same year.

Whatever his

first reception by the colonists may have been, his character and his powers very speedily attracted universal attention; and it became the theme of wonder and admiration with them all, that such a man, so fitted by his talents and his position to sway the destinies of men in courts and palaces, should "choose the better part with the remote and unfriended exiles of the obscure wildernesses of Massachusetts. In 1636, after a very short residence among them, and while he had not yet completed his twenty-fourth year, "Mr. Vane was elected governor of the colony.

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66

Clarendon describes the population of Massachusetts at this time, garbling truth with falsehood, as a mixture of all religions, which disposed the professors to dislike the government of the church; who were qualified by the king's charter to choose their own government and governors, under the obligation that every man should take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy;' which all the first planters did, when they received their charter, before they transported themselves from hence; nor was there, in many years after, the least scruple amongst them of complying with those obligations: so far men were, in the infancy of their schism, from refusing to take lawful oaths." In the same passage of the history, Vane's election and government are thus described: was no sooner landed there, but his parts made him

*Vol. i. p. 326.

"He

very quickly taken notice of; and very probably his quality, being the eldest son of a privy counsellor, might give him some advantage; insomuch that, when the next season came for the election of their magistrates, he was chosen their governor; in which place he had so ill fortune (his working and unquiet fancy raising and infusing a thousand scruples of conscience, which they had not brought over with them, nor heard of before), that, he unsatisfied with them, and they with him, he transported himself into England; having sowed such seed of dissension there as grew up too prosperously, and miserably divided the colony into several factions, and divisions, and persecutions of each other, which still continue, to the great prejudice of that plantation; insomuch as some of them, upon the ground of their first expedition, liberty of conscience, have withdrawn themselves from their jurisdiction, and obtained other charters from the king, by which, in other forms of government, they have enlarged their plantation, within new limits adjacent to the other.' Nor by Clarendon alone has Vane's administration been thus spoken of, but by writers of better faith and a nobler purpose, whom it is difficult to imagine wilfully lending themselves to the propagation of error.t

A simple detail of the short administration of Vane, derived from various sources, all of them above suspicion, will be the best answer to statements of this

*History of the Rebellion, vol. i. 327, 328.

See Mather, book iii. p. 77.; Neale, vol. i. p. 144. ; and the works of R. Baxter, passim. Mather has the following remark: Mr. Vane's election will remain a blemish to their judgment who did elect him, while New England remains a nation; for, coming from England a young unexperienced gentleman, by the industry of some who thought to make a tool of him, he was elected governor; and, before he was scarce warm in his seat, fell in with the sectaries, and sacrificed the peace of the state to them, leaving us a caveat, that all good men are not fit for government." Baxter, in his life, after speaking of Vane in the thoughtless phrase he too often adopted towards him, indulges the following utterly fictitious statement of his unpopularity in New England:-" He was fain to steal away by night, and take shipping for England, before his year of government was at an end." (Abridgment, p. 98.) The entire untruth of this will be shown.

† Winthrop's History of New England, the edition by Savage; Hutchinson's Collection of Original Papers; the second series of an extensive American work of history, called the "Massachusetts Historical Collections,"

kind. It is true that that administration was in its duration brief and stormy, and not successful in its result; but greatness, truth, and goodness are of more value than length of years, than quiet, or success.

Vane had many serious difficulties to contend against, even before a single act of his government was known. The principal persons in the colony had been already gravely prejudiced against him by the extraordinary enthusiasm he had called forth among the great and general body of the settlers: for there is no worse crime than the power of awakening the enthusiasm of multitudes, in the eyes of those who have no such power. The day on which he assumed office saw a formidable party arrayed against him, determined, on no better grounds than this, to embarrass his government at every step. The influences which operated at that early time in the annals of Massachusetts, and particularly disposed the people, always prone to controversy, to be torn and divided by the factions and intrigues which might be set afloat in the young colony, were, of course, favourable to the success of the design.

Nevertheless, in Vane's discharge of the first and most ordinary duties of the station of chief magistrate, he manifested a firmness, energy, and wisdom, truly remarkable in one of his early age and previous history. "He adapted himself," says Mr. Upham, "readily to his situation; made himself acquainted with the interests and relations of the colony; and concerted the operations of the government, which, in reference to the Indians, were particularly interesting at that period, with promptitude, skill, and effect.' Men of great learning and old experience surrounded him; but in every measure of resource or ready practical wisdom he rose easily above them all; while in

and including, in its 6th and 7th volumes, Hubbard's "General History of New England;" and, lastly, a Life of Vane, as "fourth governor of Massachusetts," by an eloquent and accomplished American writer, Mr. Charles Wentworth Upham, published a few years since in the course of a series of American biographies, and to which I feel most happy in confessing several important obligations. His admirable sketch of the Hutchinson controversy has been, in particular, a great assistance to me.