no idea of it swept through the land, stirring the treetops, and agitating the grass and the very dust. In France there was a gorgeous court; a wealthy king; nobles, rich, famous, and of long-renowned descent; there were soldiers with genius and skill; merchants and artists, and clergymen, from Abbé Jean to Cardinal Richelieu, but there was no people to appreciate or desire freedom. In Spain no one would think of free institutions; the mind of the nation, chained by the state and palsied by the church, had only life enough left for the mere external things, for gold and sugar; even her European possessions she could not hold against the vigour of Protestant Dutchmen. Italy had given lessons in commerce, arts, literature, religion, and politics to all the rest of Europe. In the Dark Ages she had kept the holy fire of science and of literature, covered in the ashes of her old renown, and when occasion offered raked the embers, with her garment fanning them to a flame, and sent little sparkles thereof to Scotland, Ireland, England, and to all the north. While despotism laid his iron rod on all the north of Europe, and the centre too, little commonwealths sprung up at practical Venice, at prudent Pisa, and at haughty Florence, as a poet calls them; green gardens were they in a snowy world, filled with many a precious plant. But these, too, had declined. Art, literature, science, "la bella scienza," the sweet art of poesy, had flourished there, but the nature of liberty craved another soil. The Reformation, which winnowed the nations with a rough wind, did not separate the wheat from the chaff in Italy. The priests were too powerful; the people too indolent; the chaff is so thick, and dry withal, that the poor wheat can germinate but slowly.

"Ay! down to the dust with them, slaves as they are,"

might well be said of Italy in the end of the sixteenth century. Other vineyards she had helped to plant, but her own she had not kept. The last service she did mankind was, perhaps, the greatest: she showed them a new and savage world beyond the fabled island of Atlantis in the West. Columbus and Amerigo, Verrazani and the Cabots, were pioneers of freedom for mankind. When Columbus turned his bark's head to the West, he little

knew that he was leading the nations to universal democracy but so it seems now.

The new idea must come across the water to make its fortune. To escape the persecution of the dragon with seven heads and ten horns, the man-child must flee with his mother into the wilderness and there sojourn, said our fathers, giving a "private interpretation" to a dark" prophecy ; at any rate, the American "earth helped the woman. Here, three thousand miles from their native land, out of the reach of old aristocratic institutions, the new nation could unfold its sentiment to an idea, could develope the idea into institutions; and, trying the experiment on a small scale at first, prepare to found a great empire on the American idea that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that it is the business of a government to preserve for each man the perfect enjoyment of all these natural rights, on the sole condition that he does the corresponding duties.

In re

There are two great periods of human history. In the one men seek to establish unity of action, and form the individuals into tribes and states. This is commonly done to the loss of personal freedom: the state subdues the citizen, and he becomes the subject merely. In religion, the ante-christian forms represent this phase of men's affairs, and, in politics, it is indicated by aristocracies, monarchies, and despotisms. Then comes the second great period of history, in which men seek for personal freedom. ligion, this is represented by Christianity, not the Christianity of the Catholics or the Protestants, but the absolute religion of human nature; in politics, by a democracy, the government of all, for all, and by all. The settlers of America, in coming here, mainly escaped from the institutions of the former period of history; the institutions which once helped mankind, but at length hindered them. They brought with them the sentiments and ideas of the same period, imperfectly formed, and such helps and institutions as had previously come out of their sentiments and ideas. They came from a nation more vigorous in the arts of peace than any which the world had seen before. They came from that nation in the time of its greatest spiritual vigour. They brought with them the best treasures of the private

spiritual earnings of the English nation-the common law, the habeas corpus, trial by jury, the form of representative government, the rich, noble literature of England, of its Elizabethan age. From the general spiritual treasures of the world, they brought Christianity and the experience of mankind for five or six thousand years. Virgin America, hidden behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, is now away to be married to mankind.

The first settlers came with different motives and expectations, driven by different forms of necessity. There came two types of men quite unlike in most important particulars the settlers of the North and the South, the Puritans of New-England, the secular and more worldly planter of Virginia and the Carolinas. They came from different motives, for a different purpose; they founded different institutions, which produce the contradictory results we now see. The difference between South Carolina and Massachusetts in 1850, dates plainly back to the different origin of the two colonies. New-England was settled for the sake of an idea; Virginia and the Carolinas by men who reasonably thought to better their condition and make their fortune. M. Chevalier long ago pointed out the distinction between these two types, the Puritan and the Cavalier; only he finds a distinction in birth, wealth, and breeding, in favour of the Cavalier, which he would not have found had he known American history somewhat better. However, the difference between the secular and the religious colonies still continues in the descendants of the two. But these types unite, or will unite, as he says, to form a future national type, namely, the Western man.

Let us look at the volumes of Mr Hildreth. His work is divided into forty-eight chapters, and, beginning with the first voyage of Columbus, ends with the election of the first President after the adoption of the Federal Constitution. When so great a theme is to be treated in the small compass of three volumes, the author must needs be brief; accordingly, he despatches quite summarily the preliminary matter, relating to the discoveries of the continent by the Italian navigators, and briefly sketches a picture of the country and its inhabitants at the period when European colonization first began. The account of the Indians is short, occupying but about twenty pages, yet distinct and

clear; for one so brief it is the best account we remember to have seen. The whole Indian population within the limits of the United States and west of the Rocky Mountains, he thinks never exceeded, if it ever reached, three hundred thousand; others make the number not far from one hundred and eighty thousand. The Indians have not yet received the attention which they demand from the historian and the philosopher; they are as remarkable monuments in the development of the human race as the fossils are in the history of the physical changes of this earth. But they are passing away; their institutions, manners, traditions, and language will soon be forgotten, and by and by it will be impossible to reconstruct the history of which they furnish so valuable a chapter.

Mr Hildreth speaks of the French settlements in America, and then comes to the history of the English colonization here. For a long time there is an apparent want of unity in the subject, which no historical treatment can wholly disguise. The reader is hurried from Virginia to NewEngland, then to New York, to Maryland, to the Carolinas, to Pennsylvania, to Delaware, and to Georgia. However, for a long time, Virginia and New-England are the objects of chief interest. We shall dwell chiefly on the latter, and call the attention of our readers to some things of considerable importance in the story of America. The character of the Puritans has been the theme of unqualified praise and unqualified condemnation; the Puritan of Hume, of Macaulay, and of Bancroft are quite different characters. Perhaps no one of these three great masters of the art of history has given us a fair and just likeness of the men. Mr Hildreth is not ambitious in his attempt to defend the fathers of New-England; he rather leaves their actions to speak for themselves. He thus speaks of them, how

ever :

"As the other traditions of the Church fell more and more into contempt, the entire reverence of the people was concentrated upon the Bible, recently made accessible in an English version, and read with eagerness, not as a mere form of words to be solemnly and ceremoniously gone through with, but as an inspired revelation, an indisputable authority in science, politics, morals, life. It began, indeed, to be judged necessary, by the more ardent and sincere, that all existing institutions in church and state, all social relations, and

the habits of every-day life should be reconstructed, and made to conform to this divine model. Those who entertained these sentinents increased to a considerable party, composed chiefly, indeed, of the humbler classes, yeomen, traders, and mechanics, but including, also, clergymen, merchants, landed proprietors, and even some of the nobility. They were derided by those not inclined to go with them as Puritans; but the austerity of their lives and doctrines, and their confident claim to internal assurance of a second birth and special election as the children of God, made a powerful impression on the multitude, while the high schemes they entertained for the reconstruction of society brought them into sympathy with all that was great and heroic in the nation.

"The Puritans denounced the Church ceremonies, and presently the hierarchy; but they long entertained profound reverence for the Church itself, and a superstitious terror of schism. Some of the bolder and more ardent, whose obscurity gave them courage, took at length the decisive step of renouncing the English communion, and setting up a church of their own, upon what they conceived to be the Bible model. That, however, was going further than the great body of the Puritans wished or dared to follow, and these separatists remained for many years obscure and inconsiderable.”—Vol. I. pp. 153-154.

There are certain peculiarities in the institutions they at first founded, which Mr Hildreth very properly dwells upon and exposes. We refer to the theocratical governments which they founded. No historian of America has so fully done them justice in this respect. He fears no man; he is not misled by any reverence for the Puritans; he shows no antipathy to them; extenuates nothing, adds nothing, and sets down nought in malice. We shall dwell a little on the theocratical tyranny which they sought to exercise. In 1629, John and Samuel Browne, at Salem, insisted on using the liturgy of the English Church, and set up a separate worship of their own, for that purpose. They were arrested as "incorrigible," "factious and evil conditioned," and shipped home to England.

In 1631, the government of Massachusetts decided that no man shall be admitted a freeman, that is, a voter, a citizen in full, unless he were a member of a church in the colony. The candidate for church membership must state his "religious experience" before the church, convince them of his "assurance" and "justification," before he shall be admitted as a member. Thus the road to the