the Elizabethan day. We should
recall that every colony of the original thirteen, except Georgia, was
founded in the seventeenth century when the energy of that great and
versatile period of the Virgin Queen had not yet dissipated itself. The
spirit that moved Ben Jonson and Shakespeare to undertake the new and
untried in literature was the same spirit that moved John Smith and his
cavaliers to invade the Virginia wilderness, and the Pilgrim Fathers to
found a commonwealth for freedom's sake on a stern and rock-bound coast.
It was the day of Milton, Dryden, and Bunyan, the day of the
Protectorate with its fanatical defenders, the day of the rise and fall
of British Puritanism, the day of the Revolution of 1688 which forever
doomed the theory of the divine rights of monarchs, the day of the
bloody Thirty Years' War with its consequent downfall of aristocracy,
the day of the Grand Monarch in France with its accumulating
preparations for the destruction of kingly lights and the rise of the
Commons.

In such an age we can but expect bold adventures. The discovery and
exploration of the New World and the defeat of the Spanish Armada had
now made England monarch of sea and land. The imagination of the people
was aroused, and tales of a wealth like that of Croesus came from
mariners who had sailed the seven seas, and were willingly believed by
an excited audience. Indeed the nations stood ready with open-mouthed
wonder to accept all stories, no matter how marvelous or preposterous.
America suddenly appeared to all people as the land that offered wealth,
religious and political freedom, a home for the poor, a refuge for the
persecuted, in truth, a paradise for all who would begin life anew.
With such a vision and with such a spirit many came. The same energy
that created a Lear and a Hamlet created a Jamestown and a Plymouth.
Shakespeare was at the height of his career when Jamestown was settled,
and had been dead less than five years when the Puritans landed at
Plymouth. Impelled by the soul of such a day Puritan and Cavalier sought
the new land, hoping to find there that which they had been unable to
attain in the Old World.

While from the standpoint of years the Cavalier colony at Jamestown
might be entitled to the first discussion, it is with the Puritans that
we shall begin this investigation. For, with the Puritan Fathers came
the Puritan Mothers, and while the influence of those fathers on
American civilization has b