828.] 



Domestic and Foreign. 



1P3 



product of our own soil. Americans long 

 depended solely, not to say helplessly, upon 

 importations from the mother country ; but 

 they have begun to pay back the debt ; and 

 in another thirty or forty years we shall 

 change places, and be in our turn the 

 debtors. English literature is evidently 

 palsying, and want of pith and force is 

 every day becoming more apparent a little 

 infusion of younger blood will perchance 

 invigorate us again. "We are glad, and 

 heartily so, to see this growing intercom- 

 munion of literature between the nations ; 

 it is in this way we shall become best ac- 

 quainted with each other, and best serve 

 each other exchanging our taste for their 

 strength misapprehensions will thus be re- 

 moved, and jealousies vanish with them ; 

 and by the united and spreading influence 

 of the two countries, liberty, by which we 

 mean the rights of communities, as contra- 

 distinguished from the usurpations of rulers, 

 will be best advanced in the old continent 

 of Europe. 



The writer of the tale before us is known 

 to his own countrymen, though quite a 

 stranger, we believe, in England, by another 

 production called " Redwood," and the pre- 

 sent shews him to be no novice in the prac- 

 tice of scribbling. We are not sure it will 

 generally take ; there is too much of the 

 wild and unreclaimed state of society, and 

 too little of the elegancies of polished life, 

 to please our modern and petted tastes ; as 

 a story, too, it is defective in distinctness, 

 and somewhat encumbered with ineffective 

 agents ; but we are sure it is the work of a 

 man full of sterling good sense thinking 

 and speaking not by the rules of art, but the 

 laws of nature a close observer and an 

 able painter, and lifted far above common 

 prejudices, and casting from him the fetters 

 of bigotry, religious and political. 



The scene of the tale is laid in Massa- 

 chusets, in the time of Charles the First, 

 when so many of our countrymen, in despair 

 of better days at home not, as now, from 

 bankrupt fortunes and bankrupt reputations 

 fled to the wildernesses of America, to 

 secure, not so much freedom of action, as 

 freedom of thinking, or at least freedom of 

 worshipping, which was denied them in their 

 native land. The passion for political 

 liberty was an after - thought ; religious 

 liberty was the prime and moving principle. 

 Political freedom was forcibly wrenched, as 

 the means only of securing what to them 

 was a higher consideration ; the more reso- 

 lute stood their ground, and fought the bat- 

 tle out while the more timid, and espe- 

 cially the more impotent and fanatic, crossed 

 the ocean, and took refuge in the solitudes 

 of unbroken forests. In these unworn re- 

 gions the Puritans prayed and preached, 

 uncontrolled by bishops, and unshocked by 

 surplices and written liturgies ; but the 

 freedom, which they thus pursued and en- 

 joyed, to the sacrifice, it should seem, of 

 every other comfort, they were little dis- 

 M.M. New Series VOL. V. No. 26. 



posed to allow to others. They had no no- 

 tion, indeed, of any one's claiming it. They 

 had themselves but one object escape from 

 the tyranny of bishops and rulers ; and their 

 companions, high and low, they supposed, 

 were as single and contracted in their views. 

 That they themselves, in exacting confor- 

 mity and obedience to their own ordinances, 

 could be regarded as tyrants, was a con- 

 sideration which never reached their under- 

 standings. They had no catholic views ; > 

 none among them ever dreamt that it could 

 be his duty, that it could even be consistent 

 with Christianity, much less the very aim 

 and spirit of it, to leave the sanctions of 

 religion to man and his maker, to content 

 himself with teaching, instructing, convinc- 

 ing his fellows, but never to proceed to 

 compiling, imposing, and enjoining creeds 

 and articles, and inflicting penalties for dis- 

 obedience. They hated control ; but hav- 

 ing thus broken from it themselves, they 

 exercised it with severity upon their de- 

 pendents. As masters and parents, their 

 very position in a lawless land made them 

 patriarchs, and they used, without scruple, 

 what appeared to them a patriarch's autho- 

 rity, and his duty ; they surveyed their 

 households and they were large with an 

 eye of vigilance and scrutiny, that pene- 

 trated to every act of life, and ruled every 

 member of it with a rod of iron, which to 

 them seemed the sceptre of divine autho- 

 rity and natural justice. The very spirit, 

 thus engendered, was severe ; and self- 

 denial was held up as the supreme virtue, 

 and the control of all natural feelings as 

 the best proof of a Christian's proficiency, 

 which was itself to be enforced where it was 

 not voluntarily observed. 



At Boston, under the protecting vigi- 

 lance of Governor Winthrop a man whose 

 virtues, and whose severities, in spite of the 

 kindliness of his nature, are made known 

 by his published journal is placed Hope 

 Leslie, the heroine of the tale transferred 

 to the governor's house for the purposes of 

 discipline from her natural guardian's, whose 

 indulgence, though himself a rigid Puritan, 

 was thought extreme, and quite unjustifiable, 

 by the creed and practice of the faithful. 

 Tliis guardian was a Mr. Fletcher, who in 

 his youth had been devotedly attached to 

 Hope's mother, his own cousin, but vio- 

 lently torn from her by the tyranny of rela- 

 tions. The cousins had sacrificed their hap- 

 piness to a sense of duty, and each of them 

 married where their hearts were not the 

 lady in England, Mr. Fletcher in America. 

 The lady's husband died after a few years, 

 and the widow proceeded to America, but 

 died on her landing, and bequeathed her 

 two daughters, Hope and Faith, to the care 

 of her cousin. 



At this time Mr. Fletcher was residing 

 at Springfield a newly broken up country. 

 His family consisted of his wife and three or 

 four children, and two Indian children a 

 girl, Magawisca, and a boy, Oneco who 

 2 C 



