For when our manners are well understood, 'Tis true, we love the courtly mien and air, Until some fair one from Britannia's court, FROM "A POLITICAL REVERIE," JAN. 1774. I look with rapture at the distant dawn, No despot here shall rule with awful sway, Nor petty pretors plunder her for kings. GEORGE BERKELEY. "THE arrival in America of the Rev. Mr. GEORGE BERKELEY, then Dean of Derry, afterwards Bishop of Cloyne," says Samuel Miller, in his Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century," deserves to be noticed in the literary history of America, not only as a remarkable event, but also as one which had some influence on the progress of literature, particularly in Rhode Island and Connecticut."* Berkeley was to the country not only a personal friend and benefactor, through the genial example of his scholar's life and conversation, and the gifts which he directly made, but he brought with him the prestige which attached to high literary reputation, and was a connecting link to America with what is called the Augustan age of Queen Anne. Born in Ireland, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, March 12, 1684, he had acquired distinction in mathematics and philosophy, and before the age of thirty had_vented his celebrated ideal theory in print. He was introduced by Steele and Swift to the circle of Retrospect, 11. 869. received his appointment as Dean of Derry; and the death of Swift's Vanessa, who made him one of her legatees, further added to his resources. With all this good fortune at hand, his benevolent enthusiasm led him to engage in the distant and uncertain project of erecting a college in the Bermudas, for converting the American Indians to Christianity. He wrote out his Proposal,* and his friend Swift gave him a letter to Lord Carteret to second the affair, with a humorous account of the amiable projector. "He is an absolute philosopher with regard to money, titles, and power; and for three years past hath been struck with a notion of founding a university at Bermuda, by a charter from the crown. He shewed me a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your Excellency will see his whole scheme of a life academico-philosophical of a college founded for Indian schools and missionaries, where he most exorbitantly proposeth a whole hundred pounds a year for himself, forty pounds for a fellow, and ten for a student. His heart will break if his deanery be not taken from him, and left to your Excellency's disposal."t Berkeley was an ingenious political economist, as his book, The Querist, proves; and managing to connect his scheme with plans of advantage to the Government, he gained, through one of his Italian friends, the ear of George I., who ordered Sir Robert Walpole to carry the project through. St. Paul's College, Bermuda, was incorporated, A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations; and for Converting the Savage Americans to Christianity, by a College to be Erected in the Summer Islands, otherwise called the Isles of Bermuda Load 1725 Swift to Lord Carteret, Sept. 8, 1794 and twenty thousand pounds promised for its support. Dean Berkeley set sail, or at least was ready to embark from Gravesend, September 6, 1728, for the New World.* He had just completed the honeymoon of his marriage with Anne Forster, the daughter of the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, to whom he had been united on the first of August,--and of whom he writes before leaving England, at this time, to his friend Thomas Prior, as a lover should, that "her humor and turn of mind pleases me beyond anything I know in her whole sex." This lady accompanied him with her friend, "my Lady Hancock's daughter;" and three gentlemen completed the party, Mr. James, Mr. Dalton, and Mr. Sinibert. The last was the artist whose name is prominently connected with the early history of American art. He sketched a group of his fellow-travellers in the cabin, at sea, at least this is one of the Berkeley traditions,-which he afterwards painted, in the interesting picture which now hangs in the Gallery of Yale College. If so, he made the addition of the child in his wife's arms subsequently, for that infant was born in America. The travellers reached Newport the 23d of January, 1729, after a protracted passage of five months. There is a tradition, which is probably worth very little, that Berkeley sent a letter on coming up the bay to the Rev. James Honeyman, the Episcopal There is a tradition that Berkeley sailed for Bermuda directly, and that the captain of the vessel, not finding his way to that island, accidentally put into Newport. This is so stated in the Memoir in Updike's History of the Narragansett Church (p. 395); but the matter is conclusively set at rest by Berkeley's own letter to his friend Thomas Prior, dated Gravesend, Sept. 5, 1728, where he says: "To-morrow, with God's blessing, I set sail for Rhode Island."-Letters appended to Memoir of Berkeley. Edition of his works by Priestley. London, 1820, i. xxxvi. + Smibert," says Mr. H. T. Tuckerman, in an article on Berkeley in the North American Review, for January, 1855, p. 190, "was the first educated artist who visited our shores, and this picture was the first of more than a single figure executed in the country." Smibert had risen in his art from the humble fortunes of a house-painter. Horace Walpole describes him in his Anecdotes of Painting as "a silent and modest man, who abhorred the finesse of some of his profession, and was enchanted with a plan that he thought promised him tranquillity and honest subsistence in a healthful elysian climate, and in spite of remonstrances engaged with the Dean."-Walpole, ed. 1849, 678. We follow Walpole, who follows Vertue, as decisive authority for the spelling of the name, about which there has been some uncertainty John Smibert. There is a description of this painting in the well prepared Catalogue of the College Gallery. The principal figure is the Dean in his clerical babit. The lady with the child is his wife; the other lady has been said to be her sister, but more probably is the Miss Hancock who accompanied her to America The gentleman writing at the table is Sir James Dalton. The gentleman standing behind the ladies has been thought by some to be a Mr. Wainwright; but is undoubtedly Mr. James. The other gentleman in brown is a Mr. John Moffat, a friend of the artist. The remaining figure is the artist Smibert. The Dean is resting his hand on a copy of Plato, his favorite author, and appears to be dictating to Sir James, who is acting as amanuensis. This painting was presented to the college in the year 1808, by Isaac Lothrop, of Plymouth, Mass. It had been preserved in Boston, in a room occupied by the Smiberts; certainly by the son, and probably by the father." SA Newport letter dated January 24, describing Berkeley's arrival, was printed in the Boston New England Journal, September 8, 1729. It says, "Yesterday arrived here Dean Berkeley, of Londonderry, in a pretty large ship. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable, pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great number of gentle men, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant manner. Tis said he purposes to tarry here with his family about three months." If the Dean did not embark on the day proposed, and some delay might have occurred, the time of his passage would, of course, be less. We find the date of the Boston paper in Updike's Narr. Ch., p. 894; the date of the Jetter in Elton's Memoir of Callender, p. 81. clergyman of the town, which found him at church celebrating a holiday. The intelligence was communicated to the congregation, Mr. Honeyman dismissed them with his blessing, and the whole body proceeded to meet the distinguished Dean on the wharf. Six months passed, and the Dean's Bermuda enterprise still lingered for lack of the prompt receipt of "Ilis Majesty's bounty." The opening of summer reconciled him, however, to the delay. He writes in June of the delight of the climate and of the birth of a son. "The truth is," he says, "if the king's bounty could be paid in, and the charter could be removed hither, I should like it better than Bermuda." His friends of the voyage were drawn at the close of the year to Boston, and solicitations were made to carry Berkeley thither, but "preferring quiet and solitude to the noise of a great town," and happy in the "two domestic comforts that are very agreeable, my wife and my little son," he still remained at Newport in the enjoyment of the country estate which he had purchased. There his acquaintance was sought by Samuel Johnson, Whitehall. afterwards the president of King's College in New York, and then a resident in Connecticut, who called his attention to the wants of Yale College, to which he became so liberal a donort of books and land; after his retirement to England settling upon the college his farm of ninety-six acres, to which he had given the name of Whitehall, for the assistance of its scholars. He also made valuable gifts to the library of Harvard, and when he left Newport distributed the books he had with him among the neighboring clergy. It was also after his arrival in England, in 1733, that he presented the organ to Trinity church, at Newport, which is still surmounted by the crown of the olden time, and which bears an inscription that it is the gift of Dr. George Berkeley, late Lord Bishop of Cloyne. This organ was originally forwarded to America by the Dean, as a gift to the town of Berke Memoir of Trinity Church, Newport, from 1698 to 1510, compiled from the Records, by Henry Bull, Esq., with Notes by the Rector, Rev. Francis Vinton.-Updike's Narr. Ch. 895. + Chandler's Life of Johnson, 55-58; ante, ST. The autograph, which we give, is taken directly from Berkeley's deed of gift to the college. The woodcut head is after the portrait in the Bmibert picture. We find the following entry in the New England Weekly Journal, October 80, 1782- Newport, October 26-We hear that the Rev. Mr. George Berkeley, Dean of Londonderry, has given his farm on this island, worth about £8,000, to Yale college, in Connecticut." ley, in Massachusetts, which had been named after him. The select men of the town, however, were not prepared to harbor so dangerous a guest, and voting that "an organ is an instrument of the devil, for the entrapping of inen's souls," declined the offer; when the Dean conferred it on Trinity. It still sends forth its strains from some of the old pipes. the future importance of the place: 'Truly, you have very little foresight, for in fifty years' time every foot of land in this place will be as valuable as the land in Cheapside.' The Dean's house, notwithstanding his prediction, is at present nothing better than a farm-house, and his library converted into the dairy: when he left America, he gave it to the college at New Haven, in Connecticut, who have let it to a farmer on a long lease; his books he divided between this college and that in Massachusetts. The Dean is said to have written in this place The Minute Philosopher."* For the value of the farm, it must be great to its present holder; Yale College having in the last century leased out the land for a terin of nine hundred and ninety-nine years, at a rent payable in wheat, which was afterwards coinmuted into the present annual receipt of one hundred and forty dollars. Berkeley left America, by the way of Boston, on his return to England, in September, 1731, and in February of the following year, preached a sermon before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, in which he speaks of his observations of the American colony, alluding, among other points, to the fashion of infidelity which had spread from the mother country. This was the topic of his chief work, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, which he published the same year, and which he had penned in America. is a series of dialogues, after the manner of Plato, ingeniously combating the free-thinking spirit of the age as it manifested itself in "the atheist, libertine, enthusiast, scorner, critic, metaphysician, fatalist, and sceptic." The dia It During his pleasant sojourn in America, we always hear of Berkeley in some amiable relation. Ile compliments the Huguenot refugee, Gabriel Bernon, in a letter written in French, on his "zeal for religion and the glory of God." He preaches constantly for his friend, the rector of Trinity, the Rev. James Honeyman, in the pulpit which is still there, while the Quakers stand in their broadbrimmed hats in the aisles to hear him; on one occasion humorously announcing that "to give the devil his due, John Calvin was a great man." In company with Smibert, Col. Updike, and Dr. Mesparran, he visits the Narraghansett Indians. To his friend, Daniel Updike, the attorney-general of the colony, he presents his "well-wrought silver coffee-pot," still preserved as a relic in the family, as the good bishop's old-fashioned chair, "in which he is believed to have composed the Minute Philosopher," is esteemed as an heir-loom at this day by Dr. Coit. There is an anecdote of Berkeley's calculations respecting the value of property at Newport, preserved by a traveller, the Church of England clergyman, Andrew Burnaby, who visited Newport in 1760, which at this time of day is curious. The growth of Newport, which suffered a relapse after the Revolution, and was for a long while in abeyance, is now again in the ascendant; not as Berkeley may have anticipated with the commerce of Cheap-logue is graced by occasional passages of descripside, but with the luxury of the American Baie. "About three miles from town," writes Burnaby, is an indifferent wooden house, built by Dean Berkeley, when he was in these parts: the situation is low, but commands a fine view of the ocean, and of some wild rugged rocks that are on the left hand of it. They relate here several strange stories of the Dean's wild and chimerical notions; which, as they are characteristic of that extraordinary man, deserve to be taken notice of. One in particular, I must beg the reader's indulgence to allow me to repeat to him. The Dean had formel a plan of building a town upon the rocks, and of cutting a road through a sandy beach which lies a little below it, in order that ships might come up and be sheltered in bad weather. He was so full of this project, as one day to say to one Smibert, a designer, whom he had brought over with him from Europe, on the latter asking some ludicrous question concerning Mason's Newport Illustrated, 99. It is said that there is another claimant for the honors of the organ, in a church of Brooklyn, N. Y. The story goes that the Newport organ being out of repair, was sent to New York to be put in order. A portion of the pipes were found to be so defective that it was considered expedient to replace them by new ones, which were provided, and forwarded in the old case. It afterwards occurred to a workman that the old metal should not be thrown away; so he restored the rejected pipes, and they were set up in a new case in the Brooklyn Church. Mason states, "the original case, of English oak, is still in use in the church, and It contains a part of the old works, with the addition of such new pipes as were found necessary when it was rebuilt a few years ago," + Updike's Narr. Church, 190, * Ibid. 290, 806. tion of the scenery at Newport, in the midst of which it was written. It opens with a reference to the disappointment in the Bermuda scheme. I flattered myself, Theages, that before this time I might have been able to have sent you an agreeable account of the success of the affair which brought me into this remote corner of the country. But instead of this, I should now give you the detail of its miscarriage, if I did not rather choose to entertain you with some amusing incidents, which have helped to make me easy under a circumstance I could neither obviate nor foresee. Events are not in our power; but it always is, to make a good use even of the very worst. And I must needs own, the course and event of this affair gave opportunity for reflections that make me some amends for a great loss of time, pains and expense. A life of action, which takes its issue from the counsels, passions, and views of other men, if it doth not draw a man to imitate, will at least teach him to observe. And a mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself. For several months past I have enjoyed such liberty and leisure in this distant retreat, far beyond the verge of that great whirlpool of business, faction and pleasure, which is called the world. The writer describes his host Euphranor, the philosopher and the farmer, two characters not so Travels through the Middle Bettlements in North America, In the years 1750 and 1760. By the Rev. Andrew Burnaby, A.M., Vicar of Greenwich. Lond. 4to. 1778. inconsistent in nature as by custom they seem to be, and his friend Crito, who maintain the burden of discourse in behalf of truth and Revelation against the sceptical Alciphron and Lysicles. The first conversation is in the open air-a pleasant picture of the landscape. Next morning Euphranor rose early, and spent the forenoon in ordering his affairs. After dinner we took a walk to Crito's, which lay through half a dozen pleasant fields planted round with plane trees, that are very common in this part of the country. We walked under the delicious shade of these trees for about an hour before we came to Crito's house, which stands in the middle of a small park, beautified with two fine groves of oak and walnut, and a winding stream of sweet and clear water. We met a servant at the door with a sinall basket of fruit, which he was carrying into the grove, where he said his master was, with the two strangers. We found then all three sitting under a shade. And after the usual forms at first meeting, Euphranor and I sat down by them. Our conversation began about the beauty of this rural scene, the fine season of the year, and some late improvements which had been made in the adjacent country by new methods of agriculture. The next "Dialogue" is carried on by the seashore: Next morning Aleiphron and Lysicles said the weather was so fine they had a mind to spend the day abroad, and take a cold dinner under a shade in some pleasant part of the country. Whereupon, after breakfast, we went down to a beach about half a mile off; when we walked on the smooth sand, with the ocean on one hand, and on the other wild broken rocks, intermingled with shady trees and springs of waters, till the sun began to be uneasy. We then withdrew into a hollow glade between two rocks. These associations are cherished at Newport, and the spot is pointed out where Berkeley wrote Alciphron. It gives a flavor to the region to have had the fine argument and poetic thoughts of the book written there. Though it belongs to English rather than American literature, we may quote one of its passages, for its bearing upon the author's liberality to our colleges, that in which he refutes an attack of Shaftesbury upon "men of the church and universities" as unfriendly to true learning. In the mean time, I must beg to be excused, if I cannot believe your great man on his bare word; when he would have us think, that ignorance and ill taste are owing to Christian religion or the clergy, it being my sincere opinion, that whatever learning or knowledge we have among us, is derived from that order. If those, who are so Bagacious at discovering a mote in other eyes, would but purge their own, I believe they might easily see this truth. For what but religion could kindle and preserve a spirit towards learning, in such a northern rough people! Greece produced men of active and subtile genius. The public conventions and emulations of their cities forwarded that genius; and their natural curiosity was amused and excited by learned conversations, in their public walks and gardens and porticos. Our genius lends to amusements of a grosser kind: we breathe a grosser and a colder air: and that curiosity which was general in the Athenians, and the gratifying of which was their chief recreation, is among our people of fashion treated like affectation, and as such banished from polite assemblies and places of resort; and without doubt would in a little time be banished the country, if it were not for the great reservoirs of learning, where those formalists, pedants, and bearded boys, as your profound critic calls them, are maintained by the liberality and piety of our predecessors. For it is as evident that religion was the cause of those seminaries, as it is that they are the cause or source of all the learning and taste which are to be found, even in those very men who are the declared enemies of our religion and public foundations. Every one, who knows any thing, knows we are indebted for our learning to the Greek and Latin tongues. This those severe censors will readily grant. Perhaps they may not be so ready to grant, what all men must see, that we are indebted for those tongues to our religion. What else could have made foreign and dead languages in such request among us? What could have kept in being and handed them down to our times, through so many dark ages in which the world was wasted and disfigured by wars and violence? What, but a regard to the Holy Scriptures, and theological writings of the fathers and doctors of the church And in fact, do we not find that the learning of those times was solely in the hands of ecclesiastics, that they alone lighted the lamp in succession one from another, and transmitted it down to after-ages; and that ancient books were collected and preserved in their colleges and seminaries, when all love and remembrance of polite arts and studies were extinguished among the laity, whose ambition entirely turned to arms! A eulogy which might be justly extended to our American seats of literature which have been so greatly indebted to clergymen. Berkeley soon became Bishop of Cloyne, and some years afterwards again found vent for his amiable enthusiasm in advocating his specific of tar water, which he made quite the fashion of the day,* and for which he gained the attention of philosophers and theologians by the subtle speculations of his Siris; a Chain of Philosophi cal Reflections and Inquiries concerning the virtues of Tar Water; and divers other subjects connected together and arising one from another.t In his death Berkeley realized the Euthanasia which he had desired. On a Sunday evening, Jan. 14, 1753, as he was with his family in his residence at Oxford, lying on a couch listening to his wife reading a sermon by Sherlock, the final messenger came to him in silence, and it was not perceived that he was dead till his daughter offered him a cup of tea. He was buried at Christ Church, and a well written inscription in Latin was put upon his nonument: but the friendly pen of Pope wrote his lasting epitaph: "It is impossible," writes Mr. Duncombe to Archbishop Herring in 1744, to write a letter now without tincturing the ink with tar water. This is the common topic of discourse both among the rich and poor, high and low; and the Bishop of Cloyne has made it as fashionable as going to Vauxhall or Ranelagh." Had the conversation(Coleridge's) been thrown upon paper It might have been easy to trace the continuity of the links; Just as in Bishop Berkeley's Siria, [Seiris ought to have been the name, Le Ecipis, a chain] from a pedestal so low and abject, so culinary as tar water, the method of preparing it and its medicinal effects-the dissertation ascends, like Jacob's ladder, by just gradations, into the Heaven of Heavens and the Thrones of the Trinity."-De Quincy, To Berkeley every virtue under heaven. Berkeley's prophetic verses on America, so often quoted, will secure his popular reputation with our history. As an introduction to them we may present, with other illustrations of the main idea, a passage from George Herbert's poem of "The Church Militant," published in 1633, in which the progress of religion westward had been a century earlier commemorated. Religion stands on tiptoe in our land, They have their times of Gospel, e'en as we. In 1684 Sir Thomas Browne published "certain Miscellany Tracts," one of which, entitled The Prophecy, contained several reflections of this kind Epilogue to the Satires. And sometimes misquoted, particularly in making one of the lines misread Westward the star of empire takes its way. These lines, though now familiar to every schoolboy, were not many years ago brought out by Mr. Verplanck in his anniversary discourse before the New York Historical Society as a novelty, and Knapp, in his Lectures on American Literature, quotes this little poem as extremely scarce" from that source. -Lectures, 64. There is a curious reminiscence, or rather unsatisfactory tradition, of these lines of Berkeley, in a letter of John Adams to Benjamin Rush, dated 1807, in which he introduces "brother Cranch, a gentleman of four score," and interrogates him as to a couplet, the second line of which ran And empire rises where the sun descends: The eastern nations sink, their glory ends, "I asked him," continues Adams, "if Dean Berkeley was the author of them. He answered, no. The tradition was, as he had heard it for sixty years, that these lines were inscribed, or rather drilled, into a rock on the shore of Monument Bay, in our old colony of Plymouth, and were supposed to have been written and engraved there by some of the first emigrants from Leyden, who landed at Plymouth. However this may be, I may add my testimony to Mr. Cranch's, that I have heard these verses for more than sixty years I conjecture that Berkeley became connected with them, in my head, by some report that the Bishop had copied them into some publication. There is nothing in my little reading, more anclent in my meinory than the observation that arts, sciences, and empire had travelled westward; and in conversation it was always added, since I was a child, that their next leap would be over the Atlantic into America"-John Adams's Works, ix. 600. on the rise and progress of America, in which, Dr. Johnson says, "Browne plainly discovers his exlately with more confidence by Dr. Berkeley, pectation to be the same with that entertained that America will be the seat of the fifth empire.'" It is in verse, with a prose commentary. The lines relating to America are, When New England shall trouble New Spain, The benevolent prophecies of Berkeley, in reference to America, also recall to us the later anticipations, which, if not the measure of our performance, were of his own benevolence, expressed in 1773 by the good Bishop of St. Asaph, the worthy friend of Franklin, before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which always had American welfare at heart. "It is difficult," said he, "for men to look into the destiny of future ages, the designs of Providence are too vast and complicated, and our own powers are too narrow to admit of much satisfaction to our curiosity. But when we see many great and powerful causes constantly at work, we cannot doubt of their producing proportionable effects. The colonies in North America have not only taken root and acquired strength, but seem hastening, with an accelerated progress, to such a powerful state as may introduce a new and important change in human affairs." He goes on to describe their opportunities and the prospects of new states. "The vast continent itself, over which they are gradually spreading, may be considered as a treasure, yet untouched, of natural productions that shall hereafter afford ample matter for commerce and contemplation." And he anticipates that "time and discipline may discover some means to correct the extreme inequalities of condition between the rich and the poor." VEESES ON THE PROSPECT OF PLANTING ARTS AND LEARNING The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime, In distant lands now waits a better time, In happy climes, where from the genial sun In happy climes the seat of innocence, Where nature guides and virtue rules, Life of Sir Thomas Browne. Sir Thomas Browne's Works, iv. 232. Grahame, in his History of the United States, notices this idea of western progress in the country, quoting Burnaby's Travels, and referring to the language of the Italian improvisatore to Benjamin West, as the story is related in Galt's Life.-History, iv. 186, 448, Bishop Shipley's Works, IL. SUS, |