e of that dire conflict afterwards made ample
confession of their heat, their folly, and their outrages,--approving
the stern proceedings under which they had suffered. Wheelwright,
especially, in whose advocacy the cause of his sister-in-law first
assumed so threatening an aspect, most humbly avowed his sin and
penitence.

One more very curious illustration of the divergence of judgment in our
two new historians may be instanced. They have both written, as became
them, quite brilliantly and vigorously, about the aborigines of the
soil. But how marvellously they differ! Dr. Palfrey discredits the
romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor
and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity
of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and
forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues
of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity. He sighs over them
another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart;
but he does not lament in their sad method of decay the loss of any
element of manhood or of the higher ingredients of humanity. But Mr.
Arnold pitches his requiem to a different strain. He reproduces and
refines the romance which Dr. Palfrey would dispel. He exalts the Indian
character; gathers comforts and joys and pleasing fashionings around
their life; enlarges the sphere of their being, and asserts in them
capacity to fill it. The wigwam of Massasoit is elegantly described by
Mr. Arnold as "his seat at Mount Hope," (p. 23,)--and pungently, by
Dr. Palfrey, as "his sty," in whose comfortless shelter, Winslow and
Hopkins, of Plymouth, on their visit to the chief, had "a distressing
experience of the poverty and filth of Indian hospitality." (pp. 183,
184.) Arnold tells us, the Indians "were ignorant of Revelation, yet
here was Plato's great problem of the Immortality of the Soul solved
in the American wilderness, and believed by all the aborigines of the
West." (p. 78.) But Palfrey, knowing nothing of what his contemporary
was writing, had already put into print this sentence:--"The New England
savage was not the person to have discovered what the vast reach of
thought of Plato and Cicero could not attain." (p. 49.)

Here are strange variances of judgment. But how much more of interest
and activity lives in the mind, both of writers and readers, when
history is written with such divergent philosophies and co