for a pure religion that they were dwelling in poor huts on these ocean headlands, and sustaining their lives upon muscles gathered on the shore after the receding of the tide.

Dr. Palfrey and Mr. Arnold hold and utter quite opposite judgments about the treatment of Roger Williams by Massachusetts. The latter, having stated more definitely than the former the limited aim of our colonists, which was utterly inconsistent with toleration in religion and with laxity in civil matters, nevertheless considers the men of Massachusetts unjustifiable in their course toward the founder of Rhode Island. Dr. Palfrey, on weaker grounds than those allowed by Mr. Arnold, thinks their most stringent proceedings perfectly defensible. He regards Mr. Williams as an intruder, whose opinions, behavior, and influence were perilous alike to the civil and the religious peace of the colonists; and he holds the colonists as not chargeable with any breach of the laws of justice or of mercy in sending out of their jurisdiction, into another patch of the same wilderness, a man all whose phenomena were of the most uncomfortable and irritating character. We confess that our reading and thinking identify our judgment on this matter with that of our own historian. There can be no question but that Roger Williams - whether he was thirty-two years old, as Mr. Arnold thinks, or, as Dr. Palfrey judges, in his twentyfifth year, when he landed here—was, in what we must call his youth, seeing that he lived to an advanced age, a heady and contentious theorizer. Our fathers could not try more than one theory at a time; and the theory they were bent upon testing naturally preceded, in the series of the world's progressive experiments, the more generous, but, at the same time, more dangerous one which he advanced; and their theory had a right to an earlier and a full trial, as lying in the way of a safe advance towards his bolder Utopianism. The mild Bradford and the yet milder Brewster were glad when Plymouth was rid of

him. His first manifestation of himself, on his arrival here, requires to be invested with the halo of a later admiration, before it can be made to consist with the heralding of an apostle of the generous principles of toleration and charity in religion. Winthrop had recorded for us his refusal "to join with the congregation at Boston." This had been understood as referring to an unwillingness on the part of Williams to enter into communion with the church. But from a letter of his which has come to light within the year, it seems that he had been invited, previously to the arrival of Cotton, to become teacher of the church. And on account of what constraint of soulliberty did he decline the office? Because the members of that church "would not make a public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the churches of England, while they lived there"! The good man lived to grow milder and more tolerant of the whims and prejudices and convictions of his fellow-men, through a free indulgence of his own. And, what is more remarkable, he found it necessary to apply, in restraint of others, several of the measures against which he had protested when brought to bear upon himself. He came to discover that there was mischief in "such an infinite liberty of conscience" as was claimed by his own followers. The erratic Gorton was to him precisely what the legislators of Massachusetts had feared that he himself would prove to be to them. He publicly declared himself in favor of "a due and moderate restraint and punishing" of some of the oddities of the Quakers. In less than ten years after he had so frightened Massachusetts by questioning the validity of an English charter to jurisdiction here, he went to England on a successful errand to obtain just such a document for himself and his friends.

Our two historians, with all the facts before them, honestly stated too, but diversely interpreted, stand in open antagonism of judgment about the proceedings of Massachusetts against the

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Antinomians. That bitter strife fœmina facti-was in continuation of the issue opened by Roger Williams, though it turned upon new elements. Here, again, Mr. Arnold stands stoutly for the partisans of Mrs. Hutchinson, who moved towards the new home in the Narragensett country. He sees in the strife, mainly, a contest of a purely theological character, leading on to a development of democratical ideas. (p. 66.) Dr. Palfrey insists that it would be unjust to allege that the Antinomians were dealt with for holding "distasteful opinions on dark questions of theology," and affirms that they were put down as wild and alarming agents of an "immediate anarchy." (pp. 489, 491.) In this matter, also, our own judgment goes with our own historian. And the very best confirmation that it could have is found in the fact, that the prime movers in the most threatening stage of that dire conflict afterwards made ample confession of their heat, their folly, and their outrages,-approving the stern proceedings under which they had suffered. Wheelwright, especially, in whose advocacy the cause of his sister-in-law first assumed so threatening an aspect, most humbly avowed his sin and penitence.

One more very curious illustration of the divergence of judgment in our two new historians may be instanced. They have both written, as became them, quite brilliantly and vigorously, about the aborigines of the soil. But how marvellously they differ! Dr. Palfrey discredits the romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage

virtues of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity. He sighs over them another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart; but he does not lament in their sad method of decay the loss of any element of manhood or of the higher ingredients of humanity. But Mr. Arnold pitches his requiem to a different strain. He reproduces and refines the romance which Dr. Palfrey would dispel. He exalts the Indian character; gathers comforts and joys and pleasing fashionings around their life; enlarges the sphere of their being, and asserts in them capacity to fill it. The wigwam of Massasoit is elegantly described by Mr. Arnold as "his seat at Mount Hope," (p. 23,)—and pungently, by Dr. Palfrey, as "his sty," in whose comfortless shelter, Winslow and Hopkins, of Plymouth, on their visit to the chief, had "a distressing experience of the poverty and filth of Indian hospitality." (pp. 183, 184.) Arnold tells us, the Indians "were ignorant of Revelation, yet here was Plato's great problem of the Immortality of the Soul solved in the American wilderness, and believed by all the aborigines of the West." (p. 78.) But Palfrey, knowing nothing of what his contemporary was writing, had already put into print this sentence :-"The New England savage was not the person to have discovered what the vast reach of thought of Plato and Cicero could not attain." (p. 49.)

Here are strange variances of judgment. But how much more of interest and activity lives in the mind, both of writers and readers, when history is written with such divergent philosophies and comments! Nobly, in both cases before us, have the writers done their work, and heartily do we render our tribute to them.

ENTRANCE.

Ir was on the 6th of December, 1856, that I landed with my family at Civita Vecchia, on my return for the third time to Rome. Before we could make all our arrangements, it was too late to think of journeying that day towards the dear old city; but the following morning we set forth in a rumbling, yellow post-coach, with three horses, and a shabby, gaudy postilion, the wheels clattering, the bells on the horses' necks jingling, the cock'splumes on their heads nodding, and a half-dozen sturdy beggar-brats running at our side and singing a dismal chorus of "Dateci qualche cosa." Two or three half-baiocchi, however, bought them off, and we had the road to ourselves. The day was charming, the sky cloudless, the air tender and with that delicious odor of the South which so soothingly intoxicates the senses. The sea, accompanying us for half our way, gleamed and shook out its breaking surf along the shore; and the rolling slopes of the Campagna, flattered by sunlight, stretched all around us,—here desert and sparkling with tall skeleton grasses and the dry canes' tufted feathers, and here covered with low, shrubby trees, that, crowding darkly together, climbed the higher hills. On tongues of land, jutting out into the sea, stood at intervals lonely watch-towers, gray with age, and at their feet shallow and impotent waves gnashed into foam around the black, jagged teeth of halfsunken rocks along the shore. Here and there the broken arches of a Roman bridge, nearly buried in the lush growth of weeds, shrubs, and flowers, or the ruins of some old villa, the home of the owl, snake, and lizard, showed where Ancient Rome journeyed and lived. At intervals, heavy carts, drawn by the superb gray oxen of the Campagna, creaked slowly by, the contadino sitting athwart the tongue; or some light wine carrettino

came ringing along, the driver fast asleep under its tall, triangular cover, with his fierce little dog beside him, and his horse adorned with bright rosettes and feathers. Sometimes long lines of mules or horses, tied one to another's tail, plodded on in dusty procession, laden with sacks; sometimes droves of oxen, or poledri, conducted by a sturdy driver in heavy leathern leggings, and armed with a long, pointed pole, stopped our way for a moment. In the fields, the pecoraro, in shaggy sheep-skin breeches, the very type of the mythic Pan, leaned against his staff, half-asleep, and tended his woolly flock,or the contadino drove through dark furrows the old plough of Virgil's time, that figures in the vignettes to the "Georgics," dragged tediously along by four white oxen, yoked abreast. There, too, were herds of long-haired goats, rearing mid the bushes and showing their beards over them, or following the shepherd to their fold, as the shadows began to length

en,

-or rude and screaming wains, tugged by uncouth buffaloes, with low heads and knotted knees, bred among the malaria-stricken marshes.

Half-way to Rome we changed horses at Palo, a little grim settlement, composed of a post-house, inn, stables, a line of straggling fishermen's-huts, and a desolate old fortress, flanked by four towers. This fortress, which once belonged to the Odescalchi family, but is now the property of the Roman government, looks like the very spot for a tragedy, as it stands there rotting in the pestilential air, and garrisoned by a few stray old soldiers, whose dreary, broken-down appearance is quite in keeping with the place. Palo itself is the site of the city of Alsium, founded by the Pelasgi, in the dim gloom of antiquity, long before the Etruscans landed on this shore. It was subsequently occupied by the Etruscans, and afterwards became a favorite resort of the Roman nobility, who built there