those days. He did not deliberately mortify the flesh. We can find no testimony that he wore a hair shirt or found delight in self-inflicted pain. Austere he was, and yet he loved his wife and was affectionate to his children, although his affection did not find expression in exuberant demonstration. This is interesting in contrast with the modern American, who has little restraint, and whose emotions are vivid and quickly reached. It is another of those cumulative proofs to the student of American character that the American is not a hybrid Englishman but is the product of a new race, a race that has been produced by the forces of nature and the social and political institutions which he has created to satisfy the demands of his own nature instead of accepting those that belonged to another race in different environments.

Those famous Blue Laws of Connecticut, which all the world long believed in, never existed except in the luxuriant imagination of Rev. Samuel Peters, who had been driven out of America during the Revolution and took this ingenious means of gratifying his revenge. Women were not forbidden to kiss their children on the Sabbath; they were not prohibited from making “minced pies”; it was fiction and not truth that "no one should play on any instrument of music except the drum, trumpet, or jew's-harp." A somewhat malevolent person this

1 Peters: A General History of Connecticut, p. 71. Cf. Palfrey, vol. ii, p. 32, n.; p. 375; Trumbull: Blue Laws, True and False.

clergyman, who was denied the pleasure of knowing how much mischief he caused.

The modern idea of the Puritan is that he was the barbarian of his times, rude in his manner of living and uncultured. But this we know to be incorrect. The Puritanism of the first forty years of the seventeenth century, Palfrey says, was not tainted with degrading or ungraceful associations of any sort. "The rank, the wealth, the chivalry, the genius, the learning, the accomplishments, the social refinements and elegance of the time were largely represented in its ranks. Not to speak of Scotland, where soon Puritanism had few opponents in the class of the high-born and the educated, the severity of Elizabeth scarcely restrained, in her latter days, its predominance among the most exalted orders of her subjects. The Earls of Leicester, Bedford, Huntington, and Warwick, Sir Nicholas Bacon, his greater son, Walsingham, Burleigh, Mildmay, Sadler, Knollys, were specimens of a host of eminent men more or less friendly to or tolerant of it. Throughout the reign of James the First it controlled the House of Commons, composed chiefly of the landed gentry of the kingdom; and, if it had less sway among the peers, this was partly because the number of lay nobles did not largely exceed that of the Bishops, who were mostly creatures of the Crown. The aggregate property of the Puritan House of Commons of 1692 was computed to be three times as great as that of the Lords,

according to Hume. The statesmen of the first period of that Parliament which by and by dethroned Charles the First had been bred in the luxury of the landed aristocracy of the realm; while of the nobility, Manchester, Essex, Warwick, Brooke, Fairfax, and others, and of the gentry a long roll of men of the scarcely inferior position of Hampden and Waller, commanded and officered its armies and fleets. A Puritan was the first Protestant founder of a college at an English university.

"It may be easily believed that none of the guests whom the Earl of Leicester placed at his table by the side of his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, were clowns. But the supposition of any necessary connection between Puritanism and what is harsh and rude in taste and manners will not stand the test of even an observation of the character of the men who figured in its ranks, when the lines came to be most distinctly drawn. The Parliamentary general, Devereux, Earl of Essex, was no strait-laced gospeler, but a man formed with every grace of person, mind, and culture to be the ornament of a splendid court, the model knight, the idol, as long as he was the comrade, of the royal soldiery, the Bayard of the time. The position of Manchester and Fairfax, of Hollis, Fiennes, and Pierrepont, was by birthright in the most polished circles of English society. In the memoirs of the young regicide, Colonel Hutchinson, recorded by his beautiful and high-souled wife, we may look at the interior

of a Puritan household, and see its graces, divine and human, as they shone with a naturally blended lustre in the most strenuous and most afflicted times. The renown of English learning owes something to the sect which enrolled the names of Seldon, Lightfoot, Gale, and Owen. Its seriousness and depth of thought had lent their inspiration to the delicate muse of Spenser. Judging between their colleague preachers, Traver and Hooker, the critical Templars awarded the palm of scholarly eloquence to the Puritan. When the Puritan lawyer Whitelock was ambassador to Queen Christina, he kept a magnificent state, which was the admiration of her court, perplexed as they were by his persistent Puritanical testimony against the practice of drinking healths. For his Latin secretary, the Puritan Protector employed a man at once equal to the foremost of mankind in genius and learning, and skilled in all manly exercises, proficient in the lighter accomplishments beyond any other Englishman of his day, and caressed in his youth, in France and Italy, for eminence in the studies of their fastidious scholars and artists. The king's camp and court at Oxford had not a better swordsman or amateur musician than John Milton, and his portraits exhibit him with locks as flowing as Prince Rupert's. In such trifles as the fashion of apparel, the usage of the best modern society vindicates, in characteristic particulars, the Roundhead judgment and the taste of the century before the last. The English

gentleman now, as the Puritan gentleman then, dresses plainly in 'sad' colors, and puts his lace and embroidery on his servants.'

The Puritan was terrifically in earnest; he became self-centred, and was more influenced by that which he had within him than he was by the sense of exterior impression, but just a little more of that gracious spark of humanity and he would have given birth to a race of poets instead of a race of business men. And some were. There was Milton, the great poet of the Puritans and one of the greatest names in English literature; and the prose writings of the leaders of Puritan thought are full of poetic expression and the flash of imagination. The clearest insight into a man's character is to be gained from his letters to his wife, for the intimacy, the unrestraint of conventional expression, the revelation of aspirations, the word of affection, that mean so much to two persons in perfect sympathy, reveal the natural man, the man as he was and not as his biographer would make him. The reader who doubts the human quality in the Puritan may study with profit, and with even greater pleasure, the letters of John Winthrop to his wife.

They are admirable letters, full of sentiment and graceful allusion, with constant reference to the goodness of God and much practical advice to his son. But what particularly appeals to me, because it so conspicuously disproves the popular belief

1 Palfrey: History of New England, vol. i, pp. 278–282.