February Meeting, 1953

A STATED Meeting of the Society was held at the Club of Odd Volumes, No. 77 Mount Vernon Street, Boston, on Thursday, 26 February 1953, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the President, Hon. Robert Walcott, in the chair.

The records of the last Stated Meeting were read and approved.

The Recording Secretary, on behalf of the Corresponding Secretary, reported the receipt of letters from Mr. Thomas Boylston Adams accepting election to Resident Membership and from Mr. E. Harold Hugo accepting election to Non-Resident Membership.

Mr. Robert Hammond Haynes, of Cambridge, was elected a Resident Member of the Society.

Mr. Richard Mott Gummere read a paper entitled:

Byrd and Sewall: Two Colonial Classicists

THERE are two personalities in our American Colonial history who might profitably be compared with one another on the Plutarchian principle, pairing them off both for their contrasts and for their resemblances. They are intriguing characters, authors of outstanding diaries, leaders in their respective communities, and classical scholars who could easily have held chairs in the two colleges of which they were overseers, William and Mary, and Harvard. It is this classical tradition, and their reaction thereto, which tempts us to study briefly the writings of William Byrd the Second, of Westover, and Samuel Sewall of Massachusetts Bay.

At the beginning, several clarifying comments are in order. It might be asked: “Why Plutarch, who contrasted men of two different nationalities, and set a Greek over against a Roman in his biographies?” The answer is that, while both were Americans, the provinces of Massachusetts and Virginia were in sentiment and in space practically nearer to England than they were to each other: Byrd regards himself as a stranger to North Carolina, and Sewall worries over the unwelcome latitudinarianism of the Rhode Islanders. A quick voyage “home” to England was almost as easy as the lumbering trip by land from Boston to Williamsburg. Again, their vivid journals, and especially Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line, help to dispel the pronunciamentos of those literary critics who maintained fifty years ago that American literature before the Revolution was “hopeless from the point of view of intrinsic aesthetic value.”63 Another warning should be borne in mind: the concept of Royalist, or Cavalier, or Epicurean versus Roundhead, or Puritan, or Stoic need not be emphasized. Mr. Trevelyan and Mr. Wertenbaker have indicated the necessity for reconsideration.64 We should not be led astray by the dapper portraits of Byrd by Kneller and Bridges, or by the well-known lines of Whittier which make the Judge out to be a re-embodied Old Testament prophet. And in any case we are considering these two Colonial leaders primarily in relation to their interest in the literature and history of Greece and Rome.

As men of mark in their communities they are singularly alike in the positions they held. William Byrd was born in Virginia in 1674, grandson of a London goldsmith and of a Royalist officer. Sewall, born in England in 1652, grandson of a Coventry linen-draper who had been Town Mayor, was related on his mother’s side to the Dummer family. The Virginian was a vestryman of the Established Church, who increased his landholdings from 26,000 to 179,000 acres. The Puritan elder married the daughter of John Hull, the heroine of the pine tree shillings in Hawthorne’s story. Educationally, both received the best. Byrd got his training in a school in Essex and at the Middle Temple, with an interval in Holland. Sewall graduated A.B. at Harvard and remained there for his A.M. as well as for a short stretch as tutor, librarian, and director of the Press. Both ran through what the Romans called the cursus honorum: in the one case receiver-general and auditor-general, the Governor’s Council and in 1743 President of that body; in the other case from selectman to Governor’s Council, Chief Justice, and for a brief space Acting Governor. Byrd spent half his life in England; Sewall made one hurried visit on business in 1688. Byrd backed Andros, and lost; Sewall opposed him, and won. Both headed their respective militia units. Scientifically, Byrd was an up-to-date amateur practitioner, member of the Royal Society, a sort of minor Benjamin Franklin. Sewall’s old-fashioned ideas followed the Aristotelian code of Charles Morton’s Compendium of Physics. A sample of his fear of any conflict between revealed and physical truth is his journal entry when Cotton Mather, his intimate friend, “went Copernican”: “I think it inconvenient to assert such problems.”65 But their main avocation was an enthusiasm and a sound knowledge of the ancient classics.66

The Established Church in Virginia and Puritanism in Massachusetts, along with the essence of the English Common Law, were naturally fundamental forces. But secular interchange in literature, education, and statecraft reflected the Greco-Roman tradition. Even small straws in the wind show this tendency. Samuel Mathews, a member of the Virginia Council, protested in 1634 to Governor Harvey that the latter had violated the statute: “No man shall be recalled from his private labors to any service of his own (the Governor’s) upon any colour whatsoever.” When Harvey disagreed, Mathews in anger “turned his back, and with his truncheon lashed off the heads of certain high weeds that were growing there.”67 The story, told of Tarquin, Thrasybulus, and others, was common property to any reader of classical translations. It also occurred to one of the Founding Fathers: John Adams, in his Discourses on Davila, remarks: “Cut off the heads of the tallest poppies,—Tarquin, and all other heads of parties, Marat, etc.”

Nathaniel Bacon, hero of the 1676 rebellion, was Master of Arts from Cambridge University at the age of twenty-one. His opponent, Governor Berkeley, was an Oxonian. So was Richard Lawrence, an ally of Bacon. The usual sentiment of a dirge for the departed appears in “Bacon’s epitaph, made by his Man”:

Mars and Minerva both in him concurr’d

For arts, for arms, whose sword and pen alike,

As Cato’s did may admiration strike

Into his foes.68

George Sandys, an official of the early Jamestown settlement, translated much of his well-known Metamorphoses of Ovid during whatever spare time he could steal in Virginia. John Smith’s reports are full of illustrations from Greek and Roman heroes. Libraries of early planters, such as that of Colonel Richard Lee, contained “a Greek grammar, Caesar, Hesiod, Tulley’s Orations, Virgil, Ovid, Livy, Diogenes, Sallust, World History, Praxis Medicinae.” The tomb of Benjamin Harrison, who died in 1710, has a long inscription in Latin, containing the phrase Fide et ἀϕιλαςγυρίᾳ Insignis.69 There is an impressive total of individual plantation culture, taking the concrete form of authorship, for example, in the History and Present State of Virginia, by Robert Beverley, brother-in-law of the William Byrd with whom we are here particularly concerned. Beverley, whose formal education seems to have been confined to attendance as a lad at a school in Yorkshire, cultivated the life of a Virginia squire and occasional officeholder, but read widely in the classics and shows himself at home in ancient history, science, and Roman Law. His Laws of Virginia was an authoritative document. His History was popular in Europe, and was translated into French.70^,71

In the thickly settled Massachusetts Bay region, where University men congregated in large numbers, it might be said epigrammatically that Numa occupied the second place in pulpit matters, and Cicero loomed large in the State House. Even in the Pilgrim community, where such interest was limited, we find a spokesman. William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation is a literary classic. With scanty schooling, he is a clear writer and a self-taught scholar. He is at home in Plato, Seneca, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius, besides many of the Church Fathers and writers on religion.72 He describes the sadness of their departure: “They left them as it were weeping, as Orpah did her mother-in-law Naomi, or as those Romans did Cato in Utica who desired to be excused and borne with, though they could not all be Catos.” The famous abandonment of communistic labor speaks for itself: “The experience . . . may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times: that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.” The happy-go-lucky Morton of Merrymount is denounced: he “revived the feasts of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians.” There is a touch of humor in the two references to Seneca: the landing at Cape Cod (especially tragic as it was for Bradford) comes as a blessed relief: “no marvel if they were thus joyful, seeing wise Seneca was so affected with sailing a few miles on the coast of his own Italy, as he affirmed, that he had rather remain twenty years on his way by land than pass by sea to any place in a short time.” And the Pilgrims triumph in 1624: “by a great deal of patience they overcame hunger and famine,” which makes me remember a saying of Seneca’s, Epistle 123: “That a great part of liberty is a well governed belly, and to be patient in all wants.” In the threefold combination of Biblical, Anglo-Saxon, and classical, we find both in Massachusetts and Virginia a respectable representation for the heritage of Greece and Rome.

The Diaries are a mine of self-revealing information. Sewall moralizes; Byrd is more satirical. Sewall elaborates; Byrd conceals his deeper feelings under brief staccato comment. The Virginian records 27 April 1710 in a matter-of-fact way: “I rose at 5 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew and some Greek in Homer. Then I went to Council. . . . I was appointed commander-in-chief of two counties. . . . We sat in council again till 9 o’clock. I had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty, and said my prayers.” Sewall, when Captain of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery, is more specific. At the conclusion of a training-day program he presents the company with a half-pike: “The pike will stand me in forty shillings, being headed and shod with silver: has this motto fairly engraven:

Agmen Massachusettense

Est in tutelam Sponsae

Agni Uxoris

1701.”

On another occasion, the militia meet at the estate of Captain Jefferson (ancestor of Thomas), and Colonel Byrd “caused the troops to be exercised by each captain . . . one of the French was rude to his captain, for which I broke his head in two places”; after which there was a general jollification at John Boiling’s. All this after the usual morning stint of classical reading! Sewall is more serious. He notes elsewhere that Ensign Noyes won the marksmanship contest (Sewall himself failing to “hit the Butt”), and received from his superior officer a silver cup on which he “had provided engraven 4 May 1702, Euphraten siccare potes,” a prophecy of the victory over Anti-Christ and reminder of Sewall’s own pamphlet, Phaenomena Apocalyptica on the Beast and the Vials in Revelations, published a few years previously. Sewall conducts his operations in the spirit of a hymn like our “Onward Christian Soldiers!”; Byrd acts like one of the Three Musketeers. The Puritan records his reading with chapter and verse; the Virginian notes the fact as a journal entry.73

The very nicknames of these two Colonials reflect their reading habits as well as their temperaments. Byrd’s friends called him the “Black Swan,” double punning on the Juvenal proverb: rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cycno.74 In humorous vein he often signs himself avis, ὄρνις, or L’Oiseau. Sewall, perhaps with a coating of humor defines himself as “A Censor Morum for this end of the town.” Even Cambridge, with its excellent pastors and Presidents, must be kept up to standard: Venimus ipsam Cantabrigiam ad stabiliendos et corrigendos mores, “We even go to Cambridge to straighten out and reform character.”75

Byrd’s reading in ancient authors is systematic, and not haphazard. His entry for 18 September 1709, is as follows: “I rose at 3 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew and some Greek in Josephus. I said my prayers and danced my dance. I went to church. I read a little Greek in Homer.” It should be noted that the Josephus assignment runs well into October, and that a later spell of Thucydides continues for two months. Latin authors, which are often read in the afternoons, are evidently considered as a lighter job. Lucian and Petronius, special favorites, are not only continuous but repeated. The phrase “I danced my dance,” occurring almost daily, one suspects to refer to his morning calisthenics; for Byrd kept himself in excellent physical condition, as his later wilderness explorations indicate. Since his library included a volume of Seneca’s prose, it is not too farfetched to assume that he profited by the fifteenth Epistle, which criticizes the heavy athletics of the “bruiser” and recommends as the right sort of exercise “high-jumping, or broad-jumping, or the kind which I may call ‘The Priest’s Dance’76 or, in slighting terms, ‘The Clothes-Cleaner’s Jump.’” The parallel is curiously pertinent, for Byrd’s diary of 8 September 1740, contains this remark: “Rain all day; I danced because I could not walk.” The diarist was at that time practically of the same age as the Roman, in the neighborhood of sixty-six.

Sewall, more personal, didactic and detailed, almost thinks in Latin, binding up his thoughts in phrases. In the Diary for 26 March 1711, he notes, in contrast with Byrd’s usual brevity: mihi natalis; in Aedes intravi et ibidem Preces effudi. “My birthday; I went to church and then and there poured forth my supplications.” On another occasion he alters the Stoic proverb to a Christian form: ubi Pater, ibi patria. A phrase from a law book is always handy, as in a letter to Bridget Usher, for whom he was a trustee, with some advice about repair of a house: frustra fit per plures, quod fieri potest per pauciores: “It is useless to put many on a job that can be done by a few.” Classical tags are ever in his mind, as in his sarcastic communication to an agent in the West Indies, reproaching him for lack of promptness in consignments: vestigia terrent . . . spectantia nulla retrorsum, “the footsteps frighten me, for none of them mark the way back.” This refers to the old fable, found in Aesop and Horace, of the lion’s cave and the pretended sickness of its inhabitant.77 On the improvement in his mother’s health, he writes: Laus Deo, qui orationem non vult non exaudire. A pet oak tree is cut down, matre et sorore valde plangentibus. When a certain plan falls through, we find Homo prop, (proponit), Deus disp. (disponit) Omnia.78

His Greek, except for an excellent understanding of current Biblical scholarship, is less solid than that of Byrd. His style is more Johnsonian: aestuation is used for “a heated argument,” gravaminous for “burdensome,” Thrasonical for “braggart.” Word play on proper names was a favorite sport to him: when the Judge broke down in church after attempting to follow the choir leader (precentor) Mr. John White in a hymn, Sewall manufactured a pentameter line, punwise: Albus praecinuit; vox mihi nulla fuit. And frequently, like his favorite Ovid, “whatever he tried to say, took the form of verse.”79

Of all the classical authors, Ovid, surprisingly enough, is Sewall’s intimate model. We should have expected it to be a philosopher or a type of work like Cicero’s De Officiis. The probable reason is his love of writing original Latin verse, and thus the master of the elegiac couplet became his model. When the Judge is preserved from error spiritually or politically, he uses the slogan which we find again and again in pre-Revolutionary speeches and pamphlets: Fas est et ab hoste doceri.80 The death of Dean Winthrop, last of the old Governor’s children, at the age of eighty-one in 1704, calls forth the picturesque allusion to the Day-Star’s disappearance: Statione novissimus exit.81

One of his earliest journal entries is a communication to his friend Daniel Gookin82 on his detention at home due to illness and his regret that he cannot accompany him back to Cambridge: “Rome in all her pomp and glory could not be so much to so Noble a Man and Poet as that town must be to me.” The date is “16 Kal.Mart.1671,” and the age of the diarist was nineteen. Sewall also runs to the defence of Ovid. Writing to Cotton Mather 27 September 1708, he refuses to admit that the poet ever “stumbles,” instancing the sentiment and grace put into the mouth of Pythagoras in the Metamorphoses:

Morte carent animae, semperque priore relicta

Sede, novis domibus vivunt habitantque receptae:

“Our souls are deathless, and ever, when they have left their former seat, do they live in new abodes and dwell in the bodies that have received them.” This view of the soul’s immortality is a pagan theme welcome as a parallel to the Christian testimony.83

Sewall, oddly enough, falls back upon Ovid as a witness against stage plays. To a colleague in the law he writes 2 March 1714 on a play proposed to be acted in the Council Chamber . . . “I do forbid it. The Romans were very fond of their plays; but I never heard they were so far set upon them, as to turn their Senate-House into a Play-House.” Ovid admits: Ludi quoque semina praebent nequitiae. “Let not Christian Boston goe beyond Heathen Rome in the practice of shameful vanities!”84

One could make up a calendar from the Latin jottings in the Diary and the Letter-Book. When writing to the British agent, Sir William Ashurst, on the death of Queen Anne, Sewall adds the Horatian maxim: Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas Regumque turres. “Pale Death knocks impartially at the huts of the poor and the palaces of kings.”85 The reconciliation after a slight brush with his friend Cotton Mather results in a line of Terence, a favorite everywhere for proverbial use: Amantium irae amoris redintegratio.86 “The falling out of faithful friends renewal is of love.” Greedy men are faced with the Vergilian Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra James! “O cursed hunger for gold, to what lengths do you not drive the hearts of men!”87 After the delivery of dissertations at a Harvard Commencement, comes some semihumorous advice: Claudite iam rivos, pueri, sat prata biberunt! “Close the sluice-gates now, boys; the meadows are well watered!”88

Many incidents call forth such illustrations. Pirates are hostes humani generis; the New Hampshire boundary dispute provokes a Juvenalian anger; the deaths of old people suggest the well-worn compliment, antiquis moribus, prisca fide. Ideas are documented and sealed with fables or sayings from the ancients (including a large proportion from the Scriptures); and the close-packed life of the Bay Colony reveals itself in proverbial form.

Sewall’s early training had prepared him for the interest which was perhaps nearest his heart after his legal and political duties. Interpretation of the scriptures, and ecclesiastical affairs, were accompanied by constant study of New Testament Greek and commentaries in the Latin language. While he did not go along with his friend Cotton Mather in the march of science, he put full faith in the value of the classics as an aid to his Biblical studies. For example, he combines a gift of Calvin’s On the Psalms with a copy of T. Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romamae et Britannicae, to the schoolmaster Richard Henchman (total cost, 25 shillings), with a Latin quatrain of his own:

Mitto tibi Psaltem Christum et Sua Regna canentem;

Non erit ingratum dulce Poema tibi.

Musicus hie lapides cithara sapiente trahebat;

Et trahit: hinc Solymae moenia celsa Novae.89

The same juxtaposition may be noted in his experience at sea in 1688 on his only visit to England: “My Erasmus was quite loosened out of the binding by the breaking of the water into the Cabbin when it did. Was comforted in the even by reading the 4, 5, 6, 7, verses especially of the Ephesians.”90

Church matters went deep with Sewall, who took his theology more seriously than did Byrd. On the arrival of that stormy petrel George Keith, who was an emissary from the Bishop of London to make converts for the Established Church, and who wrote a warm letter to the President of Harvard after hearing some “heretical” Commencement speeches, the Judge confides to his journal that he looked upon this visitor as a “Helena,” a “destroyer.”91 He vigorously opposes the building of an Episcopalian church at Newbury. Though a friend of Joshua Gee, who later became an Overseer of Harvard and a colleague of Cotton Mather, he was greatly disturbed at Gee’s Commencement oration of 6 July 1720: An Christus qua mediator sit adorandus. Negat. “Should one pray to Christ in his capacity as Mediator? Answer in the Negative.”92 He was forever distributing tracts, making brief translations from the Greek and Latin versions of the Testaments, analyzing Beza’s Latin sermons on the Song of Solomon, disputing the readings of texts, and having a generally good time over his books. Often fanciful, he is at least in earnest, and usually sound in the fundamentals of the ancient languages. The devotional motif is continually in the foreground; even in a business letter to an agent in “Antego” (Antigua), asking for “as much Lignum Vitae as may make two or three very fair Mortars and pestils,” he adds a comparison with the “Tree of Life mentioned in the two and twentieth of Revelation.”93

This is an advance indication of the idea which resulted in Sewall’s favorite publication ten years later. It crystallized in 1696 in a suggestion to the President of Harvard: “Writ to Mr. Increase Mather to desire that one of the Masters might hold the following Question at the next Commencement: Res Antichristiana in America, est Euphrates ille Apocalypticus, in quem Angelus Sextus effundit Phialam Suam? Affirmat respondens S.S.”94 The Sixth Vial dries up the Euphrates; then Christ will “lift up his head.” This speculation on the significance of the Apocalypse continued to be an absorbing allegory, applied to the spiritual state of the current world and a heated subject also in the time of Jonathan Edwards. A year later we find the note: “I read to the Lieut.-Governour my Phaenomena Apocalyptica, what [sic] had written of it. He licenses the printing of it.” And a year later still: “I sent to the college Library my Phaenomena, well bound in Calvs Leather, with Mr. Oakes’s election sermon, and Mr. Willard’s Tract about Swearing, by Josiah Cotton.”95

In order that his Phaenomena might get a hearing in England, Sewall forwards a copy to Sir William Ashurst. He declares: “with Saint Austin, Recedat Donatus; Recedat Caecilianus; nec ille, nec iste Deus meus est.”96 And in this same connection we meet with the great John Wise of Ipswich, whose clerical writings forecast the doctrine of American Independence in their insistence that each Congregational parish should stand on its own feet.97 Wise, differing from Sewall and the Mathers on the subject of church organization, was pleased by Sewall’s book, and drew from the Judge a friendly exhortation: Non deficiamus Evangelium praedicare, non deficiamus Dominum annunciare; usque in Idumeam extendam calceamentum meum. Sewall himself administered a Latin rebuke to Increase Mather for his unwillingness as President of Harvard to reside in Cambridge: “Waited on Mr. Mather: I told him the Honor of Athanasius, maluit sedem quam Fidei syllabam mutare.”98

We have already noted that William Byrd’s Diaries record day by day his steady and cumulatively extensive reading in the Greek and Latin authors. The results of all this are seen in his History of the Dividing Line, an acknowledged American classic. The first ingredient of this delightfully described expedition was an official series of letters to headquarters in England. Second, came the Secret History of the Line, an informal account, which Byrd read to his family and his friends. In this version members of the party are given fictitious and caricatured names, “Firebrand,” “Humdrum,” etc. “The people looked upon us as men devoted, like Codrus and the two Decii, to certain destruction for the service of our country.” Ned Bearskin, the Indian, enlarges on his religious beliefs over the campfire: there are two roads for the soul after death, to be shown by lightning flashes, one on the right to a lovely country where a “venerable old man” sits as judge, the other over rough terrain where an ugly old woman threatens, “her head covered with rattle-snakes instead of tresses.” The party camped at a waterfall, “the noise of which gave us poetical dreams, and made us say our Prayers in Metre when we waked.”99 The third and finished product is both statistical and literary. It has the wit of Gulliver, the scientific observation of a Franklin, and the lightly worn dress of a cultivated classicist.

At one point, there were almost thirty-one miles between inhabited Virginia and the North Carolina border. The fifteen miles of No Man’s Land between the Notaway River and Wicocon Creek, covering much of the Dismal Swamp, were in question. The surveying party, including a chaplain and the mathematics professor at William and Mary College, reported at Corotuck Inlet, off Albemarle Sound, on 5 March 1728. Diplomatic relations were none too good: Byrd pokes fun, somewhat snobbishly, and perhaps unfairly, at his Carolina coadjutors in the survey. Their country has a parallel in “what Ancient Rome did before them, which was made a City of Refuge for all Debtors and Fugitives.” The Dismal Swamp is so foul that “not even a Turkey-Buzzard will venture to fly over it, no more than the Italian vultures will over the filthy Lake Avernus.” The survey was a muddy job, but the men were undaunted: “Hercules would as soon have sold the Glory of cleansing the Augean Stables, which was pretty near the same sort of work.” When the company made a fire to counteract the swamp exhalations, they built it “as large as a Roman Funeral-Pile.” “The happy man whose lot it was to carry the Jugg of Rum began already, like Aesop’s Bread-Carriers, to find it grow a great deal lighter.” Flights of birds remind the traveler of ancient omens. Myrtle, laurel, and bay trees are “sacred to Venus and Appollo.” Fountain’s Creek was named after an unfortunate who was drowned there previously and, “like Icarus, left his name to that fatal stream.” Byrd compares the gravel bottom of the Dan River to the gold of the “Pactolus in lesser Asia.” The red ochre on the banks of Paint Creek reminds him of “the river Adonis in Phoenicia, by which there hangs a celebrated fable.”100

The porters complained that they had been “half-starved, like Tantalus in the midst of plenty.” Indian scalping is like that of the “Ancient Scythians, who used these hairy scalps as Towels at Home, and Trappings for their horses.” But the cruelties of Indian torture, in Byrd’s opinion, are no worse than Achilles’ treatment of Hector, or Alexander’s crucifixion of the two thousand Tyrians. He hears of an Indian princess, last of her race, who “poison’d herself, like an Old Roman, with the Root of the Trumpet-Plant.” An unkempt native is a revolting sight, “like one of Herodotus’s East Indian Pigmies.” In their later expedition, the Progress to the Mines, a lazy weaver “needed Minerva’s inspiration.” In planning for the future city of Richmond, at the Falls of the James, the site is desirable because it is “too high for any Flood, less than that of Deucalion’s.”101 On occasion, the horses became so tired that “even Orpheus could not have inspired them to step lively”; they needed the type of martial music which “made the great Alexander start up from his seat and handle his javelin.” And at the close, “Thus ended our second expedition in which we extended the Line within the shadow of the Chariky Mountains, where we were obliged to set up our pillars, like Hercules, and return home.”

The whole journey is recorded in high spirits. Watching the wild life, Byrd wonders whether there is anything in the story of Aelian about the Egyptian frog, which carries a reed crosswise in its mouth in order not to be swallowed by an enemy. When the camping party stops for the night and the King’s birthday is announced, he bids his men throw long reeds on the fire and explode the air confined between the joints of the canes as a salute to his Majesty! The light touch is everywhere. Byrd wanted his learning to have an offhand flavor; one of the amusing passages in his diary is the scene where his wife quarreled with him because he and Parson Dunn talked Latin in her presence, and the Parson lost his temper and went off to bed. Byrd concludes: “Parson Dunn is a man of no polite conversation, notwithstanding he be a good Latin scholar.”102

One of Byrd’s few regularly published works, which can be considered in the same light as Sewall’s Phaenomena, as a wholly serious document, is his pamphlet on the history of plagues, issued in 1721 at the press of J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, London. Characteristically anonymous, it is by “A Friend of Mankind,” with the Vergilian motto: Dü talem avertite pestem! It is serious study of pestilences, beginning with “the dreadful judgments executed upon Pharaoh,” and discussing the Hebrew words which indicate such calamities. The Homeric plague, the visitation which came upon the Romans and was described by Livy,103 through various manifestations of modern times, including the London tragedy of 1665, are described in detail. The remedies attempted in the Athenian disaster recorded by Thucydides, are mentioned. Byrd’s membership in the Royal Society, his keen interest in herb remedies, and his modern contact with science, indicate that he wished to make a definite contribution to a problem which troubled all nations. And, typically Virginian, his sovereign cure is the medicinal use of tobacco, as a disinfectant.

These journal entries and the occasional publications104 of Byrd and Sewall, viewed in a classical mirror, give us a general view of their intellectual interests. To go beyond this stage would involve an extensive book, dealing with the politics and the manners of the two provinces. We may content ourselves with a glance at the most informal, and nonofficial side of the two colonial leaders. This comes out in Sewall’s hobby of original Latin verses, and in Byrd’s character studies in letter form.

Byrd the Virginia plantation owner, the diligent early-morning reader of his classics, the energetic politician, was one man at Westover, and another during his two long sojourns in London. Amid his family, with occasional bursts of frivolity, he is a typical, hard-working Southern squire. His diary indicates that from March to May of 1712 he was reading Petronius; to this period we may assign his translation of that author’s Ephesian Matron story.105 Since his library of more than 3,600 volumes included a Theophrastus, Byrd’s “Characters” in epistolary form, with assumed names for the recipients, were adapted to the fashion of the times. Some of them were written in Virginia, as that of “Veramour” to “Fidelia,” the Lucy Parke whom he married on 4 May 1706. He describes himself as taking pains at “a translation of that difficult passage of Plyny concerning the Nightingale in the 10th Book of his Natural History.”106 The translation is loose; the musical terminology is in the current fashion; and the writer renders Pliny’s non in novissimis digna miratu avis as “This is an admirable Byrd.”

Byrd in London, however, is as opposite to Sewall as anyone could be. He is trying to be as like Congreve (probably once a fellow student of his in the Middle Temple) as possible, and not succeeding. He plunged deep into the sophisticated coarseness of the period, as his third Diary indicates. He moves comfortably in the society of London and Tunbridge Wells, contributes some verses to “Tunbridgalia,” a volume by several hands, adding nothing to “the well of English undefiled,” and addressing sundry petitions to the Board of Trade seeking official position in Virginia. Between 1715 and 1725 he was thus devoted to social and political affairs, in search also for a second wife. Some of the Latinized belles whom he courted can be identified. Sabina, who refused him, was the daughter of a London magnate whom he parodied as Vigilante. “My demon,”107 he writes, “has acquainted me with many instances of your compassion.” Parthenissa, who might be Patty Blount, the friend of Pope, Facetia (Lady Elizabeth Cromwell), Zenobia, a shadow-shape, move amid clever and saucy language across his pages. The identity of Monimia is unknown, a pathetic heroine in The Orphan of Otway. The wording is mostly in terms of classical swains and shepherdesses and of ancient mythology. When irritated, he writes to Minionet on 27 June 1722: “The Graces and Furys were both represented in the shape of Women,” as in the cases of Lucrece and Messalina. His best “character” is a tribute to his friend and benefactor, Sir Robert Southwell (Cavaliero Sapiente); the best line in his Tunbridgalia is the couplet from Martial108 which introduces the collection:

Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura

Quae legis hic; aliter non sit, Avite, liber.

And the best of his miscellaneous writings is his proposal to his second wife, in Greek:109 “When I thought you knew only your mother-tongue, I was passionately in love with you; but when indeed I learned that you also spoke Greek, the tongue of the Muses, I went completely crazy about you. In beauty you surpassed Helen, in culture of mind and ready wit Sappho. It is not meet therefore to be astonished: I was smitten with such grandeur of body and soul when I admitted the poison of Love both through my eyes and my ears. Farewell. If you deem it to send any reply, you will write it in English. To Mr. Ornis at Will’s Coffee House in Bow Street, Covent Garden.”

Such was the Byrd of London days. Even in his diary deep feeling must not be shown; here is a characteristic contrast to the agonies of soul which Samuel Sewall confides to his journal. The advice of Seneca and Epictetus is as inadequate to cure a passion as is hellebore to cure Folly.110 Mix nine grams of folly with one of wisdom, is Byrd’s recommendation to Lucretia, an English relative: “That is the just proportion which Ovid and all the doctors in the deep science of Love allow to a Woman that would be invincible.”

Samuel Sewall, despite his many engagements and public responsibilities, turned off a large amount of original Latin verses. In looking over these amateur efforts of his we should not demand a Miltonic excellence; we should note the fact that a busy man, soaked in the classical tradition, produced so many of them, with naive gusto, occasional quality, and only rare lapses from correct prosody. Because of space, we must be content with a few specimens.

That he was particular with his “quantities” is proved by a letter in which he corrects his friend Richard Henchman the schoolmaster, who ended a hexameter line with: dominantur undique fraudes. “I send home your verses with thanks. There are many good strokes in them: but in my mind the English excell. I think (the phrase) does not well end a verse; the dominantur is short by rule.”111 There are times when the text is suspicious because of the rapidity of the Judge’s writing, and one is tempted to try some emendation. Keenly interested in the progress of youthful scholars, Sewall dictates a distich to his nephew Jonathan at school:

Vive, doce, regna, semper mihi, CHRISTE Sacerdos;

pendet ab officiis Spes mea tota tuis.112

Benjamin Larnell, an Indian in whom Sewall was interested, had to present the usual copy of verses on admission to Harvard; and the Judge supplies him with these rather severe offerings:

Erroresque meos mihi condonate perosos;

Absenti-que mihi precibus succurrite semper.113

Letters of sympathy on deaths among his circle of friends, or on national losses in newspaper communications, are frequent. But these, usually in Latin couplets, were customary among scholarly New Englanders, as were also such tributes as the Pietas et Gratulatio volume on the accession of George the Third, or the tribute of Latin verses offered yearly by the students of William and Mary.

We do not need to desolemnize Sewall overmuch; for the festive element is not lacking. “Captain Crow, of his Majesty’s ship Arundel, now riding at anchor in the Harbour of Boston,” receives a piece of Sewall’s daughter’s bride cake, with these punning Latin verses:

Ecce per antiphrasin vocitaris, Ductor Arundel;

Nomen te corvum dicit, natura columbam.

Et quoties opus est, pugnas virtute leonis.

Undique sic Christi nobilitate viges.

“There is a paradox in your name, O commander of the Arundel: your name is that of a Crow, your nature that of a dove. Whenever necessary, you can fight with the valor of a lion. Thus in all respects you are favored with Christ’s approval.”114 A charming little piece on the marriage of Edmund Quincy’s daughter115 in 1724 needs no apology in the company of any epithalamium:

Parvula cognatum conscendis epistula Montem,

Connubiique faces Splendentes visere gestis.

Et Sponsum, et Sponsam, iubeo syncere Salutes;

Perpetua vigeant conjuncti prole beati,

In mare dum currunt Hudson Carolusque profundum.

“O my little letter, you are ascending the Hill where my relatives live: you are eager to behold the shining wedding-torches. I bid you greet with full heart the bride and the groom. May they flourish in harmony, happy in offspring who will carry the family name, as long as the Charles and the Hudson rivers run to the sea.” The “Hill” is Mount Wollaston; the groom is John Wendell of Albany, New York.

Sewall himself, as he admitted to his friend, Richard Henchman, makes no pretence of perfection in these original Latin verses, either for himself or for others of his American colonial contemporaries. But they are of interest as vital component parts of a cultural fashion, and they were close to the heart of the writer, who was by no means a creative artist, but a cultivated leader who did not permit his college learning to lapse.

We have altered the Plutarchian method somewhat in this study of two early Americans. We have interwoven the contrasts as we went along. Sewall conforms to the Puritan tradition; Byrd, with more of Restoration England in him than most Virginia squires, is still true to his type. Sewall takes his classical scholarship seriously, and documents it; Byrd, to repeat the phrase previously used, is far more scholarly than he wishes us to think him, and takes his learning lightly. The goal of Sewall is edification, Byrd’s is entertainment. The former is literal, the latter allusive. Since we are dealing primarily with their reaction to the classics, we need not do more than point to Sewall as a moralist and to Byrd as a man of the world; but both men are genuine. They are forces in their communities, willing to be downright about their beliefs and policies. In their hands the language and literature of the Greeks and Romans—whom they never mention without respect and acknowledgment as masters, is a living essence, serving, in the words of Bacon, “for delight, for ornament, and for ability.”

Mr. Samuel Eliot Morison read an account by the Abbe Casgrain of his visit to Boston in 1871, during which he was the guest of Francis Parkman. He also read a spurious letter addressed to George Nichols and signed “Francis Higginson,” recently deposited in the Essex Institute, and demonstrated from both internal and circumstantial evidence that the letter is a forgery, probably composed in a spirit of fun by the brother of a nineteenth-century George Nichols.

1 Printed in a pamphlet Will of Thomas Boylston, late of London, without place or date of publication, in the Boston Athenæum (B 455).

2 Thomas C. Amory, The Life of Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin, Baronet (Boston, 1886), 96–110, gives an account of the Coffin schools and the text of a will establishing them that was subsequently revoked.

3 Charles H. Pope and Katharine Peabody Loring, Loring Genealogy (1917); the family’s corrected copy has been used for these data. Another branch of the Hingham family, the Joshua Lorings (for whom see the Dictionary of American Biography), were officers in the Royal Navy and loyalists.

4 So called because the earliest settler nearby, a kinsman of the Colonel Pride of Pride’s Purge, kept a yoke of oxen to pull traveling wagons out of a swampy place on the road. The post office there was still kept by an Elisha Pride at the turn of this century.

5 The small square house with mansard roof, which at the turn of the century belonged to Professor Charles Loring Jackson of Harvard, and now (1952) to a Jackson family trust.

6 Theophilus Parsons, Memoir of C. G. Loring in Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, xi (1869–1870), 282. Miss Katharine Loring told me the story that the farmer who sold the land to Mr. Paine was so conscience-stricken by the price that he asked and received, that he threw in a yoke of white oxen after the bargain was concluded.

7 Letter of 25 March 1952, and letter of Charles A. Read, 12 February 1952, who adds, “Gus had no fear during the storm and kept his head at all times.” But he had not yet acquired his later culinary skill, and they had nothing to eat out and home except baked beans, bread and strawberry jam.

8 Lest yachting purists object that North Haven dinghys were only 14 feet long, I insist that mine, the Leda, was by exception a 16-footer, having been especially built for a grandson of Bishop Doane.

9 An amusing episode was that of the Frick estate. Henry Frick, the Pittsburgh steel tycoon, wanted shore-front at Beverly, on which to build a palace. No shore land was then (c. 1904) for sale. A local realtor sold him a lot without waterfront, cut off from Plum Cove beach by the Loring property, on the ground that the Lorings were an impoverished old family who would be only too glad to sell out. The Lorings courteously offered Mr. Frick the privilege of a bathing house on their beach and the right to run a pipe down for salt water; but that was not what Mr. Frick wanted. The realtor then suggested that, since Bartletts Island was the apple of Mr. Loring’s eye, Mr. Frick authorize him to buy up the rest of the island, after which they could make a deal for the Plum Cove beach. Mr. Frick did then buy up the rest of Bartletts, greatly to the delight of the natives; but when it came to making a deal, Mr. Loring laughed and said he’d sell his part of Bartletts to Mr. Frick, but not a foot of the beach at Pride’s.

10 R. E. Bowen to S. E. M., Galveston, 20 February 1952.

11 Printed in The New England Quarterly, xxvii (1954), 53–74.

12 “Brian Harrison, Mariner, and Elizabeth Harris, widow of William Harris, Mariner, late of St. Marys, White Chapel, 18 Feb. 1620.” Chester’s Marriage Registers, edit. Joseph Foster.

13 “3 Dec. 1626. Peter Whare and Mary Bourne.” Marriage Reg. of St. John’s, Wapping.

14 “22 July 1628. Peter Whare.” Burial Reg. of St. John’s, Wapping.

15 “22 Sept. 1630. Mary, wife of Peter Whare.” Burial Reg. of St. John’s, Wapping.

16 “6 Dec. 1618, Ruth, dau. of Robert Bourne and Mary.” Baptismal Reg. of St. John’s.

17 “14 Nov. 1620, John, son of Robert Bourne & Mary.” Wapping.

18 There are no Trinity House records prior to 1660, and this date is taken from a reference in the State Papers.

19 Except that Parnell Gray married William Parker, a merchant in London: “5 Aug. 1622, William Parker of St. Peter’s, Cornhill, London, and Parnell Gray of this hamlet, singlewoman (Mar. Reg. of St. John’s, Waffing).” He died before 1626, and she married, secondly, I. Nowell, merchant, a prominent settler in Massachusetts, who went out in Governor Winthrop’s fleet in 1630, and settled at Charlestown.

20 His name appears in a list of the Younger Brethren of Trinity House, dated 1628, which is amongst the State Papers in the Public Record Office. The family of Bence were prominent in the affairs of Aldeborough for several generations.

21 Squire was a family name and had formerly been spelt Squeir.

22 Except to add that his second daughter, Judith, baptized at Wapping 14 September 1624, married Stephen Winthrop (born March, 1619), son of Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts.

23 “24 June 1635, Thomas Coytmore and Martha Rainborowe, both of this hamlet.” Mar. Reg. of St. John’s, Wapping.

24 “A daughter, Elizabeth, baptised 3 Feb. 1622, was buried at Wapping on 21 Sept. 1625”.

25 Limehouse at this time being a part of the extensive Parish of Stepney.

26 Although the Mayflower was said to have been the ship of Plymouth Pilgrims, eight years before. (Winthrop’s Journal), J. K. Hosmer, 1908.

27 The Stepney Parish Registers contain some dozens of entries concerning the Graves family, nearly all of whom are described as Shipwrights or Mariners.

28 William Adams (d. 1620), the first European to land in Japan (1600), records that at the age of twelve he began his seafaring life, being apprenticed to Nicholas Diggins, of Limehouse, with whom he remained for twelve years.

29 The parish Register of St. Nicholas, Deptford, records that he commanded a ship against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and was a brother of Sir John Hawkins.

30 The length of both is given as 116 feet, but the beam of the Speaker 34–5 as against 35 feet for the Fairfax. Their tonnage is shown as 727 and 745 respectively. Their armament varied from time to time from 50 to 62 guns.

31 Assistance had been built with the Fairfax, at Deptford; her dimensions were 102 feet by 31 feet, and tonnage 521. When first commissioned she carried 36 guns, and had a crew of 150. Her armament subsequently varied between 40 and 50 guns. She long survived and was rebuilt in 1699.

32 Some of the records and regalia were returned to Scotland a few years later, others were lost at sea after the Restoration.

33 It would appear that Penn was in command of the Triumph in Bourne’s squadron and serving under him in the engagement of the 19th, as the order of the Council of State of the same day was received by Blake, then lying in the Downs, who, on the 21st sent Penn his warrant to “wear a flag on the foretop of the ship Triumph under your charge.”

34 This refers to Captain William Badiley, of whom further mention will be made. His brother, Captain Richard Badiley, was then in command of a squadron in the Mediterranean.

35 In the original recommendation from the Admiralty Committee the space for the first of the three names was left blank, for the Council of State to fill in. Although Willoughby was named, he had, in fact, already been appointed (10 October. Cal. State Papers Dom. 1652).

36 A sailing barge.

37 The letter does not mention that Bartholomew Bourne, later referred to, who was lieutenant in the Assistance, had been killed in the same action.

38 Raveled=Tangled, confused or involved; having no basis or foundation.

39 Rude=superficial.

40 In one of the lists of ships and their commanders, in The First Dutch War (Navy Record Society), he is incorrectly entered as William Graves, but elsewhere as Thomas, or just Captain Graves. In the index he appears as William, query Thomas.

41 Colchester and Romford are on the main road from Harwich to London; the main road to the eastern counties crossed the River Lea at Bow Bridge.

42 Rolling Ground=at the entrance to Harwich Harbor, formerly much used as an anchorage.

43 Flute=A type of vessel variously described as a storeship, naval transport, or partially armed vessel; probably the kind frequently used as privateers. A buss was a two- or three-masted vessel of varying size, used especially in the Dutch herring fishery.

44 Referred to as a cousin, in the will of his brother, John Bourne.

45 A protection against impressment for service in the state’s ships.

46 Possibly the site of the present New Crane Wharf, Wapping.

47 Hoseley Bay—Hollesley Bay, between Woodbridge Haven and Orfordness; it was much used as a man-of-war anchorage for upwards of a hundred years, and long afterwards by colliers sheltering from northerly winds.

48 In May, 1660, George Fox, a founder of the Society of Friends, visited Harwich and there was so much disturbance caused by his preaching that the mayor and justice committed him and his local supporter, Robert Grassingham, to prison. They were taken to London and detained as prisoners until after the House rose at the end of August.

49 Alexander Bence, sometime M.P. for Aldeborough, a prominent merchant and a supporter of the Parliamentary cause. He was afterwards Master of the Trinity House, in 1659–1660, and continued his membership of the House after the Restoration, and until his death in 1662.

50 Piscataqua, near Portsmouth Harbor, New Hampshire.

51 Bermuda.

52 There is a list of the Elder and Young Brethren of the Trinity House in the year 1628 amongst the State Papers in the Public Record Office.

53 Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, and copied into the Dictionary of American Biography.

54 Herbert Pelham went to New England in 1635, and later had a plantation near Sudbury, Mass. In October, 1643, he was chosen Treasurer of Harvard College, but later returned to England, where he died in July, 1673.

55 “Ordinary”—formerly a meal regularly provided at a fixed price in a tavern or eating-house; also applied to a tavern where meals were provided at a fixed price, or to a dining room in such a building. In Virginia, in the eighteenth century, it referred to a tavern or inn of any kind.

56 The first mention of the Pewter Platter is in the year 1531.

57 He was, however, in Grimsby Roads, in the Assistance on 18 June, and requesting the services of a pilot to take him up to Hull for provisions. (First Order Book of the Trinity House, Hull. Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1942.)

58 Renamed after the Restoration the Royal James, and burned by the Dutch in 1667 during the Second Dutch War.

59 In a printed list of inscriptions on the tombs in Bunhill Fields Burial Ground compiled for the Report of the Committee to the Court of Common Council in 1866. However, in the Burial Ground—heavily bombed in the Second Great War—no monument any longer marks the burial place of the Bourne family.

60 Epsom, Co. Surrey.

61 Chester’s London Marriage Licences.

62 In December, 1662, his name was mentioned (as a safe man) in connection with a plot to kill the King.

63 E.g., W. P. Trent, American Literature (New York, 1903).

64 G. M. Trevelyan, Illustrated. English Social History, 11 (1950); T. J. Wertenbaker, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia (Charlottesville, 1910); S. E. Morison, The Puritan Pronaos (New York, 1936).

65 Diary, III. 31.

66 See J. S. Bassett, The Writings of Colonel William Byrd (New York, 1901). R. C. Beatty, William Byrd of Westover (Boston, 1932). The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover (1709–1712), edited by L. B. Wright and Marion Tinling (Richmond, 1941). Another Secret Diary (1739–1741), edited by Woodfin and Tinling (Richmond, 1942). Since this paper was given Dr. Wright and Miss Tinling have edited Byrd’s The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings (New York, 1958). Letters of William Byrd, II, in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, October, 1901–January, 1902.

Diary of Samuel Sewall, three volumes, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society—Fifth Series, v, vi, and vii. Sewall’s Letter-Book, ibid., Sixth Series, I and II. See also J. L. Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University (Cambridge, 1881), II. 345–364.

See also, for both Byrd and Sewall, articles in the Dictionary of American Biography.

67 T. J. Wertenbaker, Virginia under the Stuarts (Princeton, 1914), 73. Livy, I. 54 (The Tarquins and Gabii); Herodotus, v. 92 (Thrasybulus to Periander). Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge, 1952), 178.

68 Wertenbaker, Torch-Bearer of the Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1940), 40, 60, 180, etc. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, passim.

69 Martha W. Hiden, “Latin in Colonial Virginia,” The Classical Weekly, XXII (1928), no. 6, 41–45.

70 Edited by L. B. Wright (Chapel Hill, 1947). See pages 54, 98, 159, 180, 189, 229, 271, 292, 310.

71 Howard M. Jones, “The Literature of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” Memoirs of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1946. See also L. B. Wright, “The Classical Tradition in Colonial Virginia,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, xxxiii (1939), 85–97.

72 Of Plymouth Plantation 1620–1647, edited by S. E. Morison (New York, 1952). See especially pages 18, 23, 61 (Seneca, Epistle 53), 110, 120, 144, 206, 325.

73 Byrd, Secret Diary, 171; ibid., 414, 409. Sewall, Diary, II. 42 and 55.

74 Juvenal, Satires, vi. 165.

75 Sewall, Diary, II. 37; III. 379. See also, for a rebuke to an overindulgent minister, ibid., II. 267 (6 Nov. 1709).

76 Saltus Saliaris, named from the Salii, the leaping priests of Mars.

77 Horace, Epistles, I. 1, 74. For these items, see Diary, II. 305; Letter-Book, I. 323; I. 110; I. 150.

78 Diary, I. 21; I. 12; I. 25, etc.

79 Lètter-Book II. 104 (1 Feb. 1720).

80 Metamorphoses, iv. 428.

81 Diary, II. 96. “The last to leave his post in the heavens,” Metamorphoses, II. 115.

82 Letter-Book, I. 17, written at Newbury, then his home, quoting the beginning of Ovid’s Tristia. (This work is translated by A. L. Wheeler, in the Loeb Classical Library.)

83 Letter-Book, I. 372. Metamorphoses, xv. 158–159 (translated by F. J. Miller, in the Loeb Classical Library).

84 Tristia, II. 279–280.

85 Letter-Book, II. 35 (4 Oct. 1714); Horace, Odes, I. 4, 13. For the same phrase, see ibid., II. 86–87 (2 Jan.1718).

86 Letter-Book, I. 263; Terence, Andria, III. 3, 23.

87 Diary, II. 242 (15 Nov. 1708); Vergil, Aeneid, III. 56.

88 Ibid., II. 191 (4 July 1707); Vergil, Eclogues, III. 111.

89 Diary, II. 136 (24 Aug. 1705). Partially reminiscent of Horace, Ars Poetica, 394 and the building of Thebes by Amphion. Solymae is Jerusalem. The Latin word is usually treated as a neuter plural with singular meaning.

90 Diary, I. 238. Did S. mean Chapter IV, verses 5, 6, and 7?

91 See N. H. Chamberlain, Samuel Sewall and the World he lived in (Boston, 1897), 188. Diary, II. 58 (II June 1702).

92 Free speech was evidently tolerated; for Gee became college librarian in 1721; and Sewall later offered prayer at his funeral. Diary, III. 258. See C. K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vi. 176.

93 Letter-Book, I. 90 (26 Oct. 1688).

94 Ibid., I. 163. The correct form for a Master’s thesis.

95 Diary, I. 450, 475 (27 Mar. 1697 and 16 Mar. 1698). The full title was Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica ad Aspectum Novi Orbis Configurata, or, Some Few Lines Towards a Description of the New Heaven as it makes to Those Who Stand upon the New Earth.

96 Letter-Book, I. 193 (3 Mar. 1698). This refers to the famous case of Caecilianus, who was made Bishop of Carthage in opposition to the Donatists. He was backed by the Synod of Arles, a.d. 314.

97 Letter-Book, I. 196–199 (12 April 1698).

98 Diary, II. 19 (10 July 1700). The authorities were adamant: Mather must give up either his Boston pulpit or his college presidency.

99 W. K. Boyd, William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line (Raleigh, N. C., 1929). The third version, finished in 1738, was first published at Petersburg, Virginia, in 1841. Incidentally, it might be noted that the final version contains almost entirely classical allusions; there are a few exceptions, such as the horse of Hudibras (p. 119), and the Paradise of Mahomet (p. 143).

100 From Lucian (a special favorite of Byrd’s), On The Syrian Goddess, 8. The river Adonis, flowing from Libanus, at Byblos turns by sympathetic magic a red color in pity for the wounding and death of Adonis, although an old inhabitant told Lucian that it was soil blown by the wind at a certain season. This river is also mentioned by Strabo, 755. It may be the modern river Nahr-Ibrahim.

101 For the location of these passages in the Dividing Line, see J. S. Bassett, op. cit., 47, 60, 49, 43, 53, 31, 67, 96, 106, 134, 120, 130, 161, 160, 247, 37, 334, 177, 207, 219, 183, 230, 254, etc.

102 Secret Diary, 10 Nov. 1709.

103 Book 41, ch. 21.

104 Other works of Sewall include The Selling of Joseph (against the slave trade), and certain brief communications dealing with Indian problems, paper money, doctrinal matters, and support of political independence for Massachusetts. Byrd maintained an extensive correspondence with the British Government authorities and, in addition to his reports on his explorations, wrote memoranda on the natural history of Virginia which furnished material of interest to possible settlers.

105 From the Satyricon, III. (Page 229, Loeb Classical Library, translated by M. Heseltine.)

106 See H. Rackham, Pliny the Elder, Natural History, x. 43 (III. 345, Loeb Classical Library). For all these passages from Byrd’s notebooks, see Another Secret Diary, Part II. 191–475. Here we find allusions to Homer, Lucian, Herodian, Sallust, Apollonius, Athenaeus, and many others, offhand as usual and not documented. It is impossible in most cases to determine the time and place of the particular letter or “character.”

107 Another Secret Diary, 332. (The δαιμών of Socrates).

108 Epigrams, I. 16.

109 Another Secret Diary, 386, translated by Professor W. H. Harris, of the University of Richmond.

110 To Zenobia, Another Secret Diary, 261, 283.

111 Letter-Book, I. 293 (24 Feb. 1704).

112 Diary, II. 311 (16 May 1711).

113 Diary, II. 369 (20 Dec. 1712). For Larnell’s pathetic story, see C. K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vi.

114 Letter-Book, I. 245 (18 Oct. 1700).

115 Letter-Book, II. 178.

116 For example, E. Eggleston, The Beginners of a Nation (1896); Edward Arber, The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, 1606–1623 A.D., as told by Themselves, Their Friends, and Their Enemies (London, 1897); H. M. and M. Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Boston, 1905); J. A. Goodwin, The Pilgrim Republic (1920); C. E. Banks, The English Ancestry and Homes of the Pilgrim Fathers (1930).

117 The Dexters, op. cit., p. 236, n. 1, knew of its existence but made no use of it. Rev. John Raine, The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Blyth (Westminster, 1860), translated the record of the April session of 1621 for inclusion in his book, 125–126. His translation is not accurate at all points (there is even a mistake in the date) and some of his explanatory notes are misleading.

118 To those whose interest in the Scrooby country is genealogical it will be well to say at once that not one of the family names on the passenger lists of the Mayflower, Fortune, Anne and Little James is to be found in the first volume (1621–1630) of the court roll of Scrooby manor, where an even hundred different names are recorded. Tracing the ancestry of the Pilgrim Fathers has always been beset with difficulties. These have been attributed to the circumstance that most of the Pilgrims were “plain farmers,” and came from “the cottages, not from the manor houses of England.” Scholars have long been of the opinion that very few of the early settlers of Plymouth Colony came from the Scrooby area, and the complete absence of Pilgrim names from the rolls of the manor court supports this view. “A considerable examination of parish records in the neighborhood of Scrooby has proved singularly barren of results,” Dexter, op. cit., 379.

119 “Genesis of the Massachusetts Town,” 2 Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., vii. 250.

120 A History of the United States, I. 426.

121 C. M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, I. 256.

122 Dictionary of American Biography, art. by R. G. Usher.

123 Dexter, op. cit., 216–218. The medieval documentation on Scrooby is not very extensive, despite the length of the account in Dexter. For example, there is no extent of the manor, of any period. The Dexters do seem to have missed a reference to Scrooby in the Hundred Rolls, Rot. Hund., II. 26.

124 LeNeve, The Lives and Character . . . of all the Protestant Bishops of the Church of England since the Reformation (London, 1720), Pt. II, 61.

125 Dexter, op. cit., 231, n. I, where the lease is quoted in full.

126 Cal. State Papers Domestic, 1603–1610, 33.

127 E.g. Sheppard, Court Keeper’s Guide, chap. 7, par. 3. Cited by E. P. Cheyney, A History of England, I. 397.

128 Statutes at Large, II. 339–340. James 1 c. 5.

129 S. and B. Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporation Act, I (The Manor and the Borough), 124.

130 Channing, 2 Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc, vii. 262.

131 The record for 1621–1630 covers twenty-nine sheets of paper, 18 x 12, written on both sides. The book has no cover and the first page is faded and torn. Seven other paper books are for 1659–1676, 1676–1715, 1742–1773, 1774–1817, 1818–1850, 1851–1892, and 1892–1927, respectively.

Ranskill was a village of about 1, 300 acres, whose tenants did suit of court at Scrooby, nearby.

132 The names of William Hyde and William Bradley have been crossed out.

133 A line is drawn through this name.

134 A line is drawn through this name.

135 To save space the names of the constable, chief pledges, ale-tasters and jurors are omitted; also, the essoins of free tenants, residents, and customary tenants. The presentments of the jurors follow.

136 Omissions as above.

137 There were but two items of interest at this view.

138 It is not usual for a jury to be impaneled at a manor court. Their presentments were entered upon the roll in English.

139 All entries are omitted except the presentments of the jury.

140 Omissions as above.

141 Omissions as above.

142 “and dikes” is crossed out.

143 See the bibliography in S. and B. Webb, op. cit., i. 26, n. 1.

144 H. B. Simpson, “The Office of Constable,” Eng. Hist. Rev., x. 627.

145 For a list of the pertinent statutes see W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, IV. 125, n. 1.

146 Ibid., IV. 125 and n. 5. Cheyney quotes a form of oath that had become current c. 1600. This lists the constable’s duties quite fully. Op. cit., II. 404. The General Court of the Mass. Bay Colony defined the duties of a constable in 1634 and still more fully in 1658, the latter statement extending to 26 descriptive clauses.

147 For an interesting example of a constable’s account for the years 1635–1649, in the town of Stathern, Leicestershire, see Archaeological Journal, lxix. 125 ff.

148 Robert Lowe, chosen in April, 1622.

149 Hist. MSS. Com., Various Collections, i. 89.

150 Cited by Webb, op. cit., 117, n. 3.

151 William Lambard, The Duties of Constables, Borsholders, Tithingmen, and such other towne and lay Ministers of the Peace. Cited by Cheyney, op. cit., ii. 398.

152 Webb, op. cit.

153 Some manor courts continued to fix prices well into Tudor times. E.g., Nettleton, Lincolnshire, 1563. Br. Mus. Add. Ch. 15022.

154 Quarter Sessions Records (in MS.), ii. 30–32. The Statute directs that ale and beer shall be sold at “such prices and rates as shall be thought convenient and sufficient by discretion of the justices of the peace within every shire where such beer-brewer and ale-brewer shall dwell,” except in City borough or town corporate. Statutes at Large, i. 733–734.

155 Derbyshire Arch. and, Natural Hist. Soc., xx. 112.

156 At Stevenage, Hertfordshire, P. R. O. Ecc. Com. 211/46; and at Whitchurch, Hampshire, Br. Mus. Add. Ch. 44583.

157 W. O. Ault, “Some Early Village By-Laws,” Eng. Hist. Rev., xlv. 208–231.

158 Webb, op. cit., 77–78.

159 Manor Court of Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. Fenland Notes and Queries, VIII. 635.

160 Manor Court of Brightwaltham, Berkshire, P. R. O. Court Rolls, 153/73, m. 20.

161 Statutes at Large, II. 120.

162 P. R. O., Court Rolls of the Ecc. Com., 62/2, m. 12, 30, and 39d.

163 34 and 35 Henry VIII, c. 3, 7 Edw. VI, c. 7; 43 Eliz. c. 14.

164 Edingley, Nottinghamshire, P. R. O. Ct. Rolls, Ecc. Com., 62/2, m. 39d.; Scotter, Lincolnshire, Archaeologia, XLVI. 384.

165 Archaeologia, loc. cit.; Fenland Notes and Queries, viii. 355–356.

166 Rolls of Cressingham, 85.

167 Cf. P. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, 169–170.

168 At Salem a stint was established in 1680. A. B. Maclear, op. cit., 92. For a good example of an English stint see the roll of the manor court of Winterbourn Stoke (1574). Wilts. Agric. and Natural Hist. Soc., xxxiv. 211. A complete set of bylaws for the regulation of pasture rights may be found in the court roll of Tackley (1631). Oxf. Arch. Soc., Report for 1911, 66–67.

169 Scotter, 1578. Archaeologia, xlvi. 384.

170 Ealing, Middlesex Co. P.R. 0. Court Rolls, Ecc. Com., 205/ 10, m. 1.

171 John Harland, Manchester Court Leet Records, Chatham Society, lxiii. viii.

172 Plymouth Colony Records, XI. 15, 27.

173 W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, VII. 300.

174 Holdsworth, op. cit., 298.

175 See the account of Winthrop by Professor S. E. Morison in Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, iv, 1690–1700 (Cambridge, 1933), 535–549.

176 His son, John Still Winthrop, joined him in London after graduating from Yale in 1737

177 Sloane Mss. 4062, fol. 30 (British Museum, London). The list is inscribed at the bottom, “The Honourable Sr Hans Sloane Baronet from Mr. Winthrop.” As this document is not dated, the chronological reconstruction above is by the author.

178 The first word of this line is illegible. “Tantiusques” as used here, as well as in the fifth item of this list (above) and elsewhere in this account, refers to the site of the lead mine presented by the Massachusetts General Court to John Winthrop, Jr., in 1644. It was also the early name of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, within the present bounds of which the Winthrop family mine was located—in the southern part, about a mile from the Connecticut boundary. See George H. Haynes, “The Tale of Tantiusques’: An Early Mining Venture In Massachusetts.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, n.s. xvi. 471–497 (Oct., 1901).

179 Part of first word is illegible.

180 Full title: A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St. Christopher’s and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Last (2 vols., London, 1707, 1725).

181 Sloane Mss. 4062, fol. 29. The letter bears neither place nor date, save “. . . sday Night.” The portions printed in square brackets are reconstructions, as the manuscript is much defaced.

182 Journal Book, xiv. 40–41. This and other manuscripts belonging to the Royal Society in the Society’s Library in Burlington House, London, are quoted with the permission of the President and Council of the Royal Society. The Journal-Book did not record, as it usually did, the name of Winthrop’s host. If, as I suspect, it was Sir Hans Sloane, the latter had already been Secretary of the Society for several years before he retired in 1712, was almost perennially a member of the Council from about 1700, and was soon to succeed Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Society.

183 Journal-Book, xiv. 40.

184 Ibid., xiv. 40–41.

185 Ibid., xv. 355. The minutes merely state “Dr. Stuart.” It might have been either Dr. Charles or Dr. Alexander Stuart, as both were Fellows of the Society at the time. I assume that it was Dr. Alexander because a few weeks later he signed the certificate recommending Winthrop for membership.

186 For a survey of the rules governing membership in the Royal Society, see my “Colonial Fellows of The Royal Society of London, 1661–1788,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, VIII, No. 2, 178–189 ff.

187 This seems most unlikely, and I have found no other evidence to support the contention. Perhaps Winthrop spoke of his grandfather’s role in the issuing of the Connecticut Charter of 1662 and the Royal Society writers became confused.

188 The communications and contributions of John Winthrop, Jr., Governor of Connecticut, to the Royal Society are in Mass. Hist. Society, Proceedings, 1st Ser., xvi. 211–251; Thomas Birch, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (5 vols., London, 1744), ii. 418–421, 473–474; and Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London . . . (4 vols., London, 1756–1757), i. 67 ff.

189 Certificates, 1731–1750, fol. 54 (Mss. in Royal Society Library).

190 Journal-Book, xv. 410, 413.

191 Sloane Mss. 1968, fol. 58.

192 Philosophical Transactions, XL (London, 1741), “Dedication” (to John Winthrop).

193 Journal-Book, xv. 459–487. The original copy of the catalogue appears to have been lost. Cf. the Original Minutes of the Royal Society, x. 147–148, and the “fair Copy” made by the Secretaries for general reference, i.e., the reference cited at the beginning of this note. The “most interesting portions” of this list was copied by the Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society for the Hon. Edward Everett at the instance of Robert Winthrop of Boston and published in The American Journal of Science and Arts, xlvii, No. 2, 282–290 (New Haven, 1844). Actually, however, the list published omits more than two hundred of the items and there are errors in the transcriptions of Nos. 41, 46, 109, 143, 225, and 280.

194 Nos. 107–113 may have been mica schist, like the famous scythestones and whetstones of Pike, N. H., which are quartz mica schist.

195 “Granates” here and elsewhere (Nos. 231–232) almost certainly mean “garnets.”

196 “Alumen plumosum” is false asbestos. See Johann Samuel Schröter, Real- und Verbal-Lexikon Lithologisches . . . (8 vols. Berlin and Frankfurt-A.M., 1772–1788), i. 36; ii. 136 ff.

197 Nos. 160–164 refer to biotite (mica).

198 Probably not talcs in every case.

199 Most of these “spars” are probably feldspar.

200 Ludus Helmontii, or “Helmont’s Amusement,” the stone of extraordinary qualities which intrigued Jan van Helmont. See Élie Bertrand, Dictionnaire Universel des Fossiles . . . (2 vols. La Haye, 1763), i. 284, for a succinct account of its medical virtues.

201 What is this American bezoar? Traditionally, bezoars were found in animals or birds, the best from mountain goats. Powdered, they were considered an antidote for poisons and once were considered a specific for the plague. See Frank Dawson Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences (London, 1938), 104–112.

202 From southern New Hampshire? Cf. Theodore Ralph Meyers, New Hampshire Minerals and Mines . . . (Concord, N. H., 1941), 6–9.

203 Part of these must have been graphite.

204 According to the minutes, Winthrop’s part in the meetings of the Society were as follows: On 20 June 1734 he remarked that rattlesnakes were more venomous in some seasons than in others and that the horns of deer of the same species are not always identical in form; on 10 November 1737 he signed a certificate recommending Captain William Walker as Fellow; on 2 November 1738 he brought one Mr. Robinson as a guest to the meeting of the Society; and on 7 January 1741/42 he showed the Society the skin of a ground squirrel, “an Ossification of the Aspera Arteris of a Duck,” and a lump of black ore from Tantiusques which, he contended, proved that New England had ore richer in silver than that of Potosi!—Journal-Book, xv. 449–450; xvii. 296; xviii. 312; Certificates, 1731–1750, fol. 139.

205 Journal-Book, xv. 454 n.

206 Council Minutes, iii. 167–168. The Bond was required of all Fellows who resided in London as a guarantee of payment of “weekly Contributions” levied for support of the Society’s experiments and other activities. See my “Colonial Fellows of the Royal Society of London, 1661–1788,” op. cit., 183–189.

207 Philosophical Transactions, xl, for the years 1737, 1738 (London, 1741), “Dedication,” unpaged.

208 The boxes were received by the Society on 10 February 1669/70. They contained something more than fifty specimens which were listed in detail in the Journal-Book, IV. 112–117. This list includes items almost entirely duplicated in the larger collection of 1734—the dwarf oaks and their acorns, the Indian Wampum, the walnuts and hazelnuts, the bayberry wax, the shellfishes, and the ores. Many of these items are also listed in the official catalogue of the Royal Society’s museum published in 1681. See Nehemiah Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis, Or A Catalogue & Description & the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and Preserved at Gresham Colledge . . . (London, 1681), passim.

209 Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London . . . (4 vols. London, 1756–1757), i. 67 ff. Governor Winthrop’s largest single gift was that of 1669 mentioned above.

210 Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis, 205–206, 208, 346. Governor Winthrop was listed among the contributors to the Society at the end of the volume (unpaged).

211 C. R. Weld, A History of the Royal Society . . . (2 vols. London, 1848), ii. 125.

212 Charles Hatchett, “An Analysis of a mineral Substance from North America, Containing a Metal hitherto unknown,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1802, xcii. pt. 1, 49.

213 Loc. cit., 290 n.

214 Information supplied to the author by Miss J. M. Sweet, Department of Mineralogy, British Museum (Natural History), London, England. Letter of 18 March 1957. Used with permission of Miss Sweet.

215 F. S. M. Crofut, Guide to the History of the Historic Sites of Connecticut (2 vols. New Haven, 1937), ii. 721–738, 950.

216 I am much indebted to my friend and colleague, Professor George W. White, Head of the Department of Geology at the University of Illinois and a close student of the history of early American geology, for this and many other observations regarding Winthrop’s lists.

217 See Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences, 29, 98–102. Nehemiah Grew referred to eagle-stones as having been “named from a vulgar opinion.” Musaeum Regalis Societatis, 297.

218 By 1959 Mrs. Howland had completed her promised gift of $100,000 to the Society. As expenses of restoration and furnishing were met from current income and from the gifts of members and friends, the $100,000 is held as a fund (principal and income unrestricted), the income of which meets the normal operating costs of the house.

219 For an annotated biographical sketch of the merchant and an extensive analysis of his Will, see William and Mary Quarterly, third series, vii (1950), 568–587.

220 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from the text of the Will that follows.

221 Records of the First Church of Boston (copy in Massachusetts Historical Society), 12, 14.

222 N. B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853–1854), iii. 278.

223 Based on a comparison of the text in the tenth Report and the handwritten copy in the first volume of the Suffolk County Probate Records (1892).

224 Keayne had become a member of the Honourable Artillery Company of London in 1623, and had been a founder and the first captain of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. G. Goold Walker, The Honourable Artillery Company [of London] (London, 1926), 42–43; Oliver A. Roberts, History of the . . . Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts (Boston, 1895–1901), i. 1–21.

225 The complicated history of the Keayne family estate up to the death of the merchant’s granddaughter in 1704 has been sketched by Edmund S. Morgan in “A Boston Heiress and Her Husbands: A True Story,” these Publications, xxxiv. 499–513.

226 For a description of this particular property and an account of its subsequent history, see Mellen Chamberlain, Documentary History of Chelsea (Boston, 1908), chaps, xix-xxi.

227 The proper spelling of seventeenth-century names is often a puzzle as there was little consistency in usage. Hannah, Anna, and Anne were used almost interchangeably. Since Keayne himself was more or less consistent in calling his wife Anne and his granddaughter Hannah (though the latter herself apparently preferred Anna) I shall follow his preference.

228 The provisions that follow led to the construction of Boston’s first town house; the conduit project was less successful. See Josiah H. Benton, The Story of the Old Boston Town House 1658–1711 (Boston, 1908).

229 I.e., the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

230 The early results of Keayne’s benefaction to Harvard may be conveniently traced in the Harvard College Records (these Publications, xv, xvi). The income from the bequest is still being paid towards beneficiary aid to “the godliest and most hopefulest of the poorer sort of scholars.” See, Official Register of Harvard University, liii, no. 18 (September, 1956), 8.

231 Benjamin Keayne married Sarah, daughter of Governor Thomas Dudley. It soon developed that she was given to certain excessive enthusiasms. She was banished from the First Church on 24 October 1647, not only for “irregular prophecying,” but also for “falling into odious, lewd, and scandalous unclean behavior with one Nicholas Hart, an excommunicated person of Taunton.” The Records of the First Church of Boston (These Publications, xxxix), 49. For other details, see Suffolk Deeds (Boston, 1880–1906), i. 83, 84.

232 Keayne’s concern about his granddaughter’s romantic disposition and his repeated insistence that her judgment be checked by wiser heads were only too well taken. For the fantastic story of her marriages, see Morgan, “A Boston Heiress,” these Publications, xxxiv. 499–513.

233 I.e., wampum.

234 Keayne’s repeated insistence that he was not giving away more than he comfortably could was in vain. He substantially overestimated his estate. It was officially appraised at his death in 1656 at £2569 19s. 3d., a sum insufficient to cover his bequests. Suffolk County Probate Records, III. 160–173; Morgan, “A Boston Heiress,” 503–504.

235 Printed in the Essex Institute Historical Collections, xcii (1956), 265–278.

236 This paper, supplemented by the bibliography that follows it, was preprinted by the Society in 1959 and was distributed as the third of the Studies in the History of Calligraphy of the Harvard College Library, Cambridge, and the Newberry Library, Chicago. Although this volume bears the imprint of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts on the title page, copies were available only from the two libraries, which bore the expense of the preprinting.

237 E. M. Thompson, An Introduction to Greek and Latin Paleography (Oxford, 1912), 555. He is here discussing the English secretary especially. Even the informal later medieval northern scripts tended to be solid, angular and heavy.

238 R. Nash, ed., An Account of Calligraphy & Printing in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1940), 9. In the Flemish text it is called loopende.

239 For an understanding of the cancellaresca in all phases of its Italian sixteenth-century development, the well-illustrated studies by James Wardrop are essential: see Signature, no. 12, 1939 (Arrighi); new series nos. 2, 1946 (P. Sallando and G. Pagliarlo);, 1948 (Ruano and Cresci); 8, 1949 (Tagliente); 14, 1952 (Palatino), pending publication of his forthcoming book. John Howard Benson’s notes to his English facsimile edition of Arrighi’s copybook, The First Writing Book (New Haven, 1954), are also important, as are recent publications of the English calligrapher Alfred Fairbank, A Handwriting Manual (London, revised edition, 1954), and his A Book of Scripts, 1949, which offers a broad prospect in Penguin compass, with sixty-four pages of plates to serve as an “anthology of calligraphy.”

240 On falling into Maria’s trap, Malvolio delivers the familiar line, “I think we do know the sweet Roman hand” (Twelfth Night, III. iv). Katharine’s reference to A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of hands is in Loves Labours Lost, v. ii, 42. On this see George a. Plimpton, Education of Shakespeare (London and New York, 1933); also T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere’s Petty School (Urbana, 1943). The Bard’s handwriting is discussed and illustrated by E. M. Thompson, Shakespeare’s Handwriting (Oxford, 1916), and the point in question by s. a. Tannenbaum, Shakespeare and “Sir Thomas Moore” (New York, 1929).

241 The general authority for the biographies of British writing masters and the bibliography of their published works, up to the year 1800, is Sir Ambrose Heal’s monumental English Writing-Masters and their Copy-books (Cambridge [Eng.], 1931). It contains a valuable historical introduction by Stanley Morison; also the abundant collotype reproductions of copybooks are important for the background of colonial American handwriting development.

Penmen from the Lowlands frequented England and their works were published in British copybook collections—such masters as Jan van den Velde were celebrated by generations of English writing masters. The compliment was returned, too; most notably by the Fleming Jodocus Hondius who, after spending the previous decade across the Channel, published his Theatrum Artis Scribendi (Amsterdam, 1594), for which he engraved the work of two English penmen.

242 Bradford’s manuscript is on exhibit at the Massachusetts State Library, Boston. The published editions of it contain reproductions; a dozen lines in halftone (from the page preserving the “Mayflower Compact”) appear in an article by the present author, “The Handwriting of the Founding Fathers,” in Manuscripts, vii. iv (Summer, 1955).

243 See the two pages reproduced, facing pages 114 and 116, from an odd leaf bound out of place in an old record book at the probate court, Charleston, in A. H. Hirsch’s The Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina (Durham, 1928).

244 See Wardrop, “The Vatican Scriptors,” Signature, n.s. no. 5, fig. 5, for a fine collotype reproduction of Cresci’s epistolary hand.

245 Charles K. Bolton was one of the few American antiquarians to study this subject. In “Colonial Handwriting,” The Essex Antiquarian, I. 11 (November, 1897), he wrote:

“Some of the early handwriting shows a lack of training which is to be expected in an agricultural community like that in the New England of the seventeenth century. The callous hand was not always under control. A quaintness, too, was given to the page by the spelling which at best allowed some liberty to follow one’s own taste, originality and manner of pronunciation. A man who spelled ‘son’ with a double ‘o’ would now be writing his death warrant.

“But there are certain forms characteristic of the writing of our emigrant ancestors which were due neither to paper, pen nor lack of training. These are after all few, but they appear with sufficient frequency to puzzle one unfamiliar with the subject. They may be traced in part to the teaching of the schoolmaster and in part to the printed forms of letters.”

246 But see plate IIIb. Also infra see bibliographies of the Collins edition of the Instructor (Burlington, 1775), and its reissue by Crukshank (Philadelphia, 1787), copying plates and text from the English edition; its secretary hand is an anachronism.

247 Foster Watson’s article “Writing,” A Cyclopedia of Education (New York, 1913), summarizes the background of instruction in penmanship.

248 In many old writing books the copy line set by the master is in an exemplary hand, easily distinguishable from the pupil’s, and sometimes set off by different-colored ink. However, as many others at least show that the learner was working from printed copies. The small oblong books of “copy slips” introduced in the latter part of the eighteenth century served him.

249 R. F. Seybolt, Private Schools of Colonial Boston (Cambridge, 1935), is the authority on private education in Boston at this period.

250 Peter Burr’s accounts, preserved in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, show that he gave private instruction in writing to girls too.

251 The authority cited for private schools is also responsible for the standard work on public schools: R. F. Seybolt, The Public Schools of Colonial Boston 1635–1775 (Cambridge, 1935). This should be supplemented by the same author’s The Public Schoolmasters of Colonial Boston (Cambridge, 1939).

252 Town meeting was an unwieldy school board in any case. On the western fringe of civilization at Westfield, Massachusetts, for example, in 1719 the town is recorded as making provision for a “wrighting master” in November of the year following. In 1720 it was voted to leave “the concern of hiering a wrighting schoolmaster with the selectmen.” Two years later Isaac Stiles was actually serving in that capacity, as well as assisting the minister, and continued during 1723. See John H. Lockwood, Westfield and Its Historic Influences, 291, and J. G. Holland, History of Western Massachusetts (Springfield, 1855), ii. 143.

253 William Webster, An Essay on Book-keeping (London, 1752), (“The Eleventh Edition”), 77–88, “An Attempt Towards rendering the Education of Youth More Easy and Effectual.”

254 The tribute is contained in the introduction to A Delightful Recreation of 1717. It is only fair to add that this princeling from South Carolina who made such a favorable record in six months was not in London in the ordinary way but as a protégé of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to which William Brooks’s book is gratefully dedicated.

Brooks suggests in the same place that the copies in his book be cut asunder for mastery of one piece at a time. Sometimes the separated lines of copy were laid down on a piece of light board so that they could serve individual members of a class in turn and, though stained and grubby, circulate for years. However, the practice of cutting up copybooks could not on the whole be considered as in the interest of conservation and the master’s encouragement of it is suspect.

255 “Col. Fitch express’d himself as much prizing Mr. Granger’s Accomplishment to Teach Writing; never such a Person in Boston before.” Diary of Samuel Sewell, 8 March 1719/20. A Matthias Grainger published Grainger’s New Copy Book in London around 1730 but no kinship is established.

256 The report of a town committee in 1743 acting on the petition of Zachariah Hicks, usher at Boston’s North Writing School, shows the going terms. The enrollment was 280; Master Procter was paid £280 salary and Hicks received £150, which was the ground of his complaint. Admittance to the school, the committee found, was refused no child of the town who could read in the Psalter. Children of “strangers” had to pay an entrance fee. Poor children were asked to pay nothing on any account but those who could afford to make a contribution paid a few shillings for “firing,” averaging about five shillings each overall. This was taken by the master as his rightful perquisite and he insisted that he could not get along without it, especially since he had to hire additional help out of his own pocket to the amount of £100.

257 See the present author’s “Abiah Holbrook and his ‘Writing Master’s Amusement,’” Harvard Library Bulletin, vii. 1 (Winter 1953), 88–104, illustrated with collotypes of the work of Holbrook and contemporaries displaying all the usual hands of the time.

258 For illustrations of them, ibid.

259 This copy, which came down in the Gookin family through Holbrook’s adopted daughter, is in an old binding; the group at Harvard are in fairly uniform wrappers with titles in manuscript. On the engraved title of the Shelley Alphabets in all hands, hidden by a paper patch, is written “The Gift of Mr. Holbrook.”

260 In the author’s copy of this work is an inserted letter written by Thaddeus Mason Harris in his old age telling how the book was bought at the Dolbeare sale “to be exhibited to the School Masters, as models; and to the Scholars, for their excitement to fair hand-writing. . . .”

See W. C. Bates, “Boston Writing Masters before the Revolution,” New England Magazine, n.s. xix (1898/99), 403–418, for the story of the Ward collection, with reproductions of pieces from it.

261 For a notice of Rogers and this piece in particular, see R. Nash, “An American Colonial Calligraphic Sheet of King Charles’s Twelve Good Rules at Dartmouth College Library,” The Library, 5th ser. vn (1952), 111–116, with illustration.

262 William Massey, The Origin and Progress of Letters (London, 1763), 171: “I have also seen . . . Sir Matthew Hales character, and his sum of religion, in roman and italic print, written by Mary Johns . . .” around 1747.

263 See Stanley Morison, American Copybooks: An Outline of Their History from Colonial to Modern Times (Philadelphia, 1951).

264 A facsimile of the Plimpton copy, edited by Stanley Morison with his introduction, was issued at Christmas 1933 by the Printer to the University, Cambridge, England.

265 Other attempts in the way of home-study manuals on American ground but without particular handwriting instruction appeared in The Young Secretary’s Guide by John (alias Thomas) Hill at Boston in 1703; also in The Young Man’s Companion brought out as early as 1705 by William and Andrew Bradford of New York. In later editions the Bradford compilation assumed the title The Secretary’s Guide. Henry Miller of Philadelphia printed The Alphabet there in 1770, but since the only calligraphic interest in it is represented by illustration printed from type on the title page, this work hardly qualifies for our bibliography either.

266 I am indebted to Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., one of the editors of the Franklin Papers for this suggestion, and for looking (without avail) for a possible illustration of the Cyphers in manuscript.

267 Milns’s Round-Text Copies (New York), and A Set of Round Hand Copies, engraved by S. Hill (Boston), by him were published early in the nineteenth century (ca. 1810). In the burying ground on the Common, Boston, is his headstone inscribed: To the memory of William Milns Member of S^ṭ Mary Hall in the University of Oxford, Author of the well bred Scholar, The American Accountant, The Penman’s Repository, and of Several Dramatic works, Master of Salvador Academy, and of the City Commercial School in London, who died in this town, the 27^tḥ February 1801, Aged 40 years. . . .

268 According to W. Allen, The American Biographical Dictionary, 3d ed. (Boston, 1857), 475. There is no record in the Delaware state archives to support this date or place, however.

269 Note 3, p. 1 supra.

270 Two early eighteenth-century continental examples of excessive enthusiasm for subjecting the whole alphabet to mathematical rule and rigor: Aznar de Polanco, Arte nuevo de escribir por preceptos geometricos, y reglas mathematicos (Madrid, 1719); Jan Pas, Mathematische of Wiskundige behandeling der Schryfkonst (Amsterdam, 1737).

271 Cocker, The Pen’s Triumph (London, 1659).

272 “Explained” by Franklin in his Instructor of 1748 and 1753; see p. 23 f. supra.

273 William Bentley, Diary of William Bentley, D.D. (Salem, 1911), III, 389 f.

274 Ibid., III. 109.

Among other writing masters of the time who come in for comment by the diarist are Edward Norris, “a man of small powers but a good tho’ not correct penman,” and Andrew Peabody who in 1808 had been writing master in Beverly for ten years. He quotes, under date of 6 January 1808, a letter from President Jefferson regarding “the specimens which I sent him of penmanship from the children of Mr. B. Crowninshield, son of my Landlady”: “I have certainly never seen anything in either way equally perfect. . . . Be so good as to present to the young artists the assurances of my thankfulness for these acceptable proofs of their uncommon talents. If my testimony of their eminence can be any gratification to them it is offered with sincerity as justly due to them.”

Ex-President John Adams also had something to say on the subject, not quite in line with Bentley’s observation that the same position of body and fingers is not good for writing in different languages. In his deed of gift to the town of Quincy, referring to the academy, he wrote in 1822: “I advise them to begin their lessons in Greek and Hebrew, by compelling their pupils to take their pens and write, over and over again, copies of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, in all their variety of characters, until they are perfect masters of those alphabets and characters. This will be as good an exercise in chirography as any they can use, and will stamp those alphabets and characters upon their tender minds and vigorous memories so deeply that the impression will never wear out. . . . (Cited by W. S. Pattee, History of Old Braintree and Quincy (1878), 342 n.) This founding father’s own chirography is a witness to the Bentley theory.

275 Nash, ed., Calligraphy & Printing, 10, has the following exchange between the questioner of the dialogue, G., and the sixteenth-century writing master, H.: “After having shown the single letters, what do you do?” “First we show how to make words of them . . . then more and more according to the capacity of the child. . . .” “Then those who naturally have a heavy hand are not likely to write well.” “No. Nevertheless, practice can overcome this handicap in them.”

276 A letter from President Kirkland of Harvard to Tristam Burges of Providence, 22 December 1814, in the John Carter Brown Library, is to the point: “Sir, Mr. Jenkins informs me that you are disposed to aid him in getting his works published & sought for. I have told him it would be desirable, in my opinion, if they could be engraved on copperplate. He desires me to say to you that I have this impression on this subject—at the same time I have not made the calculations with any exactness. He says that you will give him the benefit of your judgment, which I hope will be the case.”

277 Cf. p. 22 supra. Jenkins says, “Let the learner be always furnished with two well made pens, the one of which should be always used entirely dry . . . to be carefully drawn or traced over the strokes or skeletons of letters before drawing the same with ink . . . to teach the learner the proper movement, pressure, and rise of the pen. It is also of great use thoroughly to impress the mind of the pupil with correct ideas of the shape of the letters.” (A. of W., 1813, p. 55 f.) See plates xxv, xxvi, xxvii; also detailed directions cited in the bibliography of Book II, infra.

278 The value of the land and buildings at 87 Mount Vernon Street, Boston, received by the Society on 14 December 1954 as a gift from Mrs. Llewellyn Howland, is not recorded on the books and is not included in the statement of assets and funds in this Treasurer’s report, or others published in this volume.

279 S. A. Drake, Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), 27.

280 C. T. Jackson, First Report on the Geology of the State of Maine (Augusta, Maine: Smith & Robinson, 1837), 43

281 Jackson, First Report, 44.

282 H. E. Taylor, “Topographical Map of Roque Island,” 1881. Enlarged manuscript map of “Taylor, 1881” is framed at New House, Roque Island.

283 E. C. Donworth, “Not to the Swift,” Washington County Railroad Monthly (Calais, Maine, 1900), May, ii, no. 1, 20–23.

284 Lincoln County Registry of Deeds (Wiscasset, Maine), 15 Sept. 1773, Vol. 9, p. 214.

285 Manuscript and memo of Joseph Pierpont to Proprietors of Township No. 22, 1789 in “Jonesborough, Maine” (Salem: The Essex Institute), Manuscript volume.

286 Lt. Col. Breyman commanded the Grenadier Battalion of 564 men of the Brunswick troops, which arrived from Germany in Quebec in June 1776 for Burgoyne’s forces. M. von Etting “The German Allied Troops in the North American War of Independence” (Albany, N. Y.: John Munsell’s Sons 1893), translation by J. G. Rosengarten.

287 Letter, Joseph Fenno to Anon., 20 June 1805. Though the letter is addressed to no one more specific than “Dear Sir,” its contents make it impossible for it to have been meant for anyone but Joseph Peabody. (Framed manuscript letter in Old Farm House, Roque Island.) For such information as has survived about Joseph Peabody’s business activities, see Walter Muir Whitehill, Captain Joseph Peabody East India Merchant of Salem (1757–1844) A Record of his Ships and of his Family compiled by William Crowninshield Endicott (1868–1936) edited and completed with a Sketch of Joseph Peabody’s Life (Salem: Peabody Museum, 1962).

288 For a ship to be “registered” meant it was built and owned by a United States citizen, and engaged in foreign trade; when it was “enrolled” it was built and owned by a United States citizen, but involved in domestic trade; while to be “licensed” meant, with the same conditions of building and ownership, that the ship was a fishing vessel. As port charges and fees varied for the different categories, it was often worth an owner’s while to shift his ship from registry to enrollment and back again.

289 Letters to John L. Gardner, Jr., from Joseph P. Gardner, 13 Sept. 1867; and from John L. Gardner, Sr., 16 Sept. 1867.

290 John L. Gardner, Jr., to George A. Gardner, 8 July 1888.

291 Eleanor Palffy, Largely Fiction (Boston, 1948), 305.

292 Deed, Thomas Kelley to Francis Shaw, Jr., dated 18 Sept. 1773, Lincoln County Registry of Deeds (Wiscasset, Maine), Book 9, p. 214.

293 Jonathan Stone, “Survey of the Mespeckey Islands for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Plan of XXII, Aug. 1785.” The original survey map is in the Land Office, Forest Service of the State of Maine, Augusta, Maine. Book no. 8, p. 62 (old number “176”) entitled “Great Moosepeckick or Rogues” shows the islands in detail, p. 59 (old number “172”) shows the whole township.

294 For this section the writer draws heavily on personal communications with Dr. Frank T. Siebert, Jr.

295 According to R. W. Hale, Jr., The Story of Bar Harbor (New York: Ives Washburn, Inc., 1949), 48.

296 Collections of the Maine Historical Society. Documentary History 2nd Series, vi. 88.

297 Franquelin-de-Meulles, Carte d’une partie du Canada et de l’Acadie, 1686. (Original in Depot des Cartes et Planns de la Marine, Service Hydrographique, Paris, portfolio No. 132. A photostat is in the Map Room, Harvard College Library, M 3006, F 18–1–4B.) It is also called I. Mouchibequi on Anon., Carte Particuliere de la Coste d’Accadie, 1702, a chart which follows Franquelin. (Original in Depot des Cartes etc., Paris, portfolio 132. A photostat in the Map Room, Harvard College Library, M 3006 F 18–2-2B.)

298 Anon., Carte des côtes de l’Acadie,? 1697. (Original in Depot des Cartes, etc., Paris, portfolio 132. A photostat in the Map Room, Harvard College Library, M 3006, F 18–1-5.)

299 M. Seutter, Partie Orientale de la Nouvelle France ou du Canada . . . Augsbourg? 1720. (Original in Map Room, Harvard College Library, M 3085.11.)

300 The framed original hangs in the living room of the New House at Roque Island.

301 Narrative of American Voyages and Travels of Captain William Owen R.N., edited by Victor H. Paltsits (New York: New York Public Library, 1942), 118, 136, 151.

302 Lincoln County Registry of Deeds, Vol. 10, p. 69, as quoted in the Bangor Historical Magazine, Vol. 5, no. 3 (Sept. 1889), p. 67.

303 J. F. W. Des Barres, “No. 2—Charts of the Coast and Harbours of New England . . .” (London, 1776). A complete set is in the Map Room, Harvard College Library (MA 4865.781–1 no. 5). A framed original of “No. 2” hangs in the hall of the New House at Roque Island.

304 C. Blaskowitz, “A Plan of the Sea Coast from Gouldsborough Harbor to . . . Passamaquoddy . . . ,” Manuscript map in Hydrographic Department, the Admiralty, London, on which the Atlantic Neptune chart was based, clearly shows the spelling to have been Reach. This is only one of several errors made either by Blaskowitz, the District Deputy, who made the survey for Samuel Holland, the Surveyor General for the Northern District of North America, or those who actually drew the final charts in the Admiralty. A photostat of part of this manuscript map was obtained through the great kindness of Vice Admiral John Godfrey, R.N. (Ret.) whose daughter, Mrs. John Kinmonth, was a guest at Roque Island.

305 F. Kidder, Military Operations in Eastern Maine and Nova Scotia (Albany: J. Munsell, 1867), 137,130.

306 See footnote 2, this chapter. Rufus Putnam, under whose supervision this survey was made, left his unpublished survey notes to the Marietta College Library, Marietta, Ohio, where they now are.

307 J. Norman, The American Pilot Containing the Navigation of the Sea Coasts of North America (Boston, 1791). Copies of this very rare chart are in the Houghton Library of Harvard College (p. AC7-N7844.791A) and the Boston Athenæum

308 O. Carleton: A map of the lottery and other townships east of Mt. Desert Is. In the Massachusetts Archives, Maps and Plans, No. 995,1792 (Boston, 1792).

309 The Privateer Wasp Journal 1782. Proceedings of the Maine Historical Society 2nd Series, Vol. 6 (Portland, 1895). There is also an entry for 21 July, “Sayled as far as Mrs. Peck Reach there cooked dinner and then sailed to Machias.”

310 F. H. Eckstorm, Indian Place Names of the Penobscot Valley and Maine Coast. University of Maine Studies, 2nd Series, No. 55, The Maine Bulletin, xliv, No. 4 (Nov. 1941) (Orono, Maine), 217.

311 W. F. Ganong, Notes for projected “Monograph of the Indian Place Nomenclature of the Atlantic Provinces of Canada and adjacent parts of Quebec, Newfoundland and Maine.” This has never been published. His notes on Moosabec and Mispek (a word stemming from the Nova Scotia Micmacs, rather than from the Penobscot dialect, meaning “flooded by the tide”) were provided the writer, and their use permitted through the courtesy of the director of their repository, J. R. Harper, The New Brunswick Museum, St. John, New Brunswick.

312 Works Progress Administration, Maine, the American Guide Series (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), 284–285.

313 The material presented in this paper is included in Mr. Labaree’s book Patriots and Partisans, The Merchants of Newburyport, 1764–1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

314 C. O. 5: 66, pp. 127–136, which has been transcribed here. Another copy is found in the Newcastle Papers, 33030, f. 318 ff. I am obliged to Nancy Davis Sachse for help in transcription.

315 Huske’s career is briefly outlined in Notes and Queries, 12th ser., viii (1921), 217, 335; Appleton's Cyclopœdia of American Biography (New York, 1887–1924), III. 330; Lawrence C. Wroth, An American Bookshelf, 1755 (Philadelphia, 1934) 135–136.

316 See below, note 6.

317 L. B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1929) 137–139

318 Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, xliii. 197. Horace Walpole once referred to Huske as “a wild, absurd man”; yet he admitted that he was “very conversant with America,” and commended his remarks in the House of Commons on at least two occasions. Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, re-ed. G. F. Russell Barker (London, 1894), ii. 190–191, 213–214. Franklin, who used materials furnished by Huske for newspaper letters on the state of trade with the colonies, described him as a “judicious Merchant.” Verner W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin's Letters to the Press, 1758–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1950), 141 ff. Sir Lewis Namier includes Huske among “the foremost experts on America” of the period. England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930), 265.

319 Oppression, a Poem by an American (with notes by “a North Briton”) was published in London in 1765 and reprinted in Boston and New York the same year. The identity of author and annotator is unknown. Notes and Queries, 12th ser., viii (1921), 335. The New English Dictionary cites this poem as affording the earliest use of the term “Yankee” as a “nickname for a native or inhabitant of New England.”

320 See Wroth, An American Bookshelf, 1755 (Philadelphia, 1934), 136.

321 Sir John Fortescue, The Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December 1783 (London, 1927–1928), I. 226, 236, 247, 276.

322 Carl Van Doren, ed., Letters and Papers of Benjamin Franklin and Richard Jackson, 1753–1785 (Philadelphia, 1947), 22.

323 6 George III, c. 49. It is printed in Danby Pickering, The Statutes at Large (Cambridge, 1762–1807), xxvii. 262–270.

324 Fortescue, I. 309. For the members of the Committee, see Commons Journal, xxx. 811.

325 The Peace of Paris, 1763, terminating the Seven Years’ War.

326 The Revenue Act of 1764 (the so-called “Sugar Act,” dated April 5) was followed two weeks later by the Currency Act.

327 Investment.

328 On the annual average.

329 According to the sixth section of the Revenue Act of 1764 (4 George III, c. 15), each gallon of molasses and syrups produced in foreign colonies and imported into British colonies was to pay a duty of 3d. See Pickering, Statutes at Large, xxvi. 35.

330 Huske errs on the date; he means the Revenue Act of 1764. In the same year Grenville’s administration issued special instructions for the seizure of all foreign vessels found in West Indian ports. Burke reversed this policy in 1765, granting privileges for Spanish ships. The Cambridge History of the British Empire, ed. J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton, E. A. Benians (Cambridge, 1929–), I. 345.

331 Provided by the Molasses Act of 1733.

332 Roseau.

333 The export of rice direct from the British colonies to points in Europe south of Cape Finisterre had been permitted since 1730.

334 The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1742), occasioned by Anglo-Spanish conflicts over the conduct of Latin-American trade.

335 Guardacostas, customhouse cutters.

336 Impost, duty.

337 During the eighteenth century the Isle of Man was notorious as a resort of smugglers. Not until 1765 did the Stanley family sell its sovereign rights in the island, including the customs revenue, to the British crown.

338 This represents the balance of principal and interest due in connection with the sale of 500 shares of The Lehman Corporation and the purchase of $10,000 United States Treasury bonds.