is beautifully done. An artist may find
his paintings in these pages. Our poets may here find themes which will
be the more tempting and rewarding, the more closely they are held
to severe historic verity. They will find, that, after all, the most
promising materials for the imagination to deal with are facts. The
residence of the exiles in Holland, their debates and arrangements with
respect to a more distant remove, the ocean passage, the first forlorn
experiences during two winters at Plymouth, are vividly presented. The
paragraph, on page 182, beginning, "A visitor to Plymouth," gives us
a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall. If the
sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon
the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering
beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene
as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in
the most direful and needless self-inflictions. "Why could they not have
been content to cling to the comforts of Old England, and to restrain
their wilfulness of spirit?" The question is answered now differently
from what it would have been then. We have used one wrong word about
those exiles, in speaking of them as _cowering_ under their woes. They
did not _cower_, but _breasted _them.

After another most pregnant and exhaustive episode on Puritan politics
in England, Dr. Palfrey brings in that thread of his story on which is
strung the fortune of Massachusetts. It is here that Englishmen will
find explained some of our vaunting views of the importance of our
annals. Dr. Palfrey, in this and in other chapters, traces with skill
and exactness the course of public measures and events in England,
through kingly tyrannies and popular resistance, which ended by
harmonizing the institutions of the mother country for a little while
with those which had sprung up in this wilderness. He soon comes upon
ticklish matters, but his touch and hold are firm, because he feels sure
that he is dealing with men who understood themselves, and who were
at least resolute and honest, to whatever degree they may have erred.
Probably, like many of us who are aware that we could not possibly have
lived comfortably with our ancestors, he feels all the more bound on
that account to set their memory in the light of their noblest and least
selfish ends. He is stout and unflinching in his championship of those
ancesto