and the house for certain articles of his in his brother James's paper, the New England Courant; James himself having been thrown into jail for a month in consequence of publishing animadversions upon the colonial administration, (1723.) Cosby, governor of New York, went farther than Shute against the freedom of the press. His council, with whom he was having a violent dispute, took to a newspaper, the Weekly Journal, of which John Peter Zenger was the publisher. The governor, although he had his organ in the New York Gazette, determined that the council should be deprived of theirs, and that Zenger should be punished. After an imprisonment of eight months, Zenger was tried for libel, and escaped condemnation only by the exertions of his counsel, Andrew Hamilton, of Pennsylvania. The little sympathy that there was with Zenger on the score of a free press may be conceived from the fact that, though acquitted, he was left to bear the losses of his imprisonment, (1732-33.)

Intellec

Editions of It was a striking proof of advancing energies the Bible. that the Boston press gave in issuing an edition of the Bible, the privilege of printing the English version being a monopoly of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Boston edition bore the imprint of the king's printer in London, (about 1752.) A German Bible had been already printed in Germantown, Pennsylvania, (1743.) The intellectual development of the colonies was tual de altogether of a grave cast. To trace it in action, ment: in we are obliged to follow the men of the time into action. circumstances where exertion, anxiety, and devouring care exclude all lighter aspects. We seldom find the graceful mind or the sportive spirit; it is all solemn deliberation, weighty argument, the natural methods of dealing with subjects so serious and relations so momentous as those in which the colonists were involved.

velop

In literature.

Pass from men of action to men of contemplation, and the same signs appear. The primitive writings treat of matters of life and death to their authors. Whether

it is the chronicler, like Governor Bradford, of Plymouth, or the traveller, like John Lederer, in Virginia, each wears a sober countenance and tells a sober story. If we penetrate into the mazes of witchcraft literature, as much of the early New England writings may be styled, we find that what look to us like the wildest hallucinations then appeared the sternest facts. Imagination, it is true, had much to do with them; but it was imagination excited to that degree in which the unreal seems more true than the real. At a later time, the colonial literature assumed lighter forms. There were writers of travels, of essays, even of poems, to some of which we shall presently advert. But the chief men of letters were still of grave mien; indeed, there was hardly one out of the clerical ranks. The influence of clergymen upon literature as upon life was very sensible for many years beyond the period of which we treat. At the head, perhaps, of the colonial writers, was the theologian and the metaphysician Jonathan Edwards, a native of Connecticut and a minister of Western Massachusetts, whose treatise on the Freedom of the Will reads like a plea for all the gravity of learning as well as for all the severity of dogma then vanishing away.

In science.

Science found its earnest votaries. There was one, indeed, whose inquiries were so resolute and so brilliant as to throw lustre over the whole country. Benjamin Franklin, a student and a writer from his early youth, at the same time that he was a hard-working printer, solved the mysteries of the thunder cloud, into which, frequently as it appeared, science had not then actually penetrated, (1752.) Nor were his electrical discoveries the only results of his scientific attainments. A sometime neighbor of

Franklin, John Bartram, of Pennsylvania, whom the great Linnæus called "the first natural botanist in the world," was the creator of a botanic garden near Philadelphia, and at the same time the explorer of the whole country from Canada to Florida, (1751-66.) His son, William Bartram, continued the work begun by the father, leaving an account of his own journeyings as full of freshness as the forests and the plains which he explored. Another branch of science was nobly cultivated by John Winthrop, a descendant of the Massachusetts governor, who occupied the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard College. His astronomical observations, continued for many years, (1740-79,) enlarged the sphere of knowledge in Europe as well as in America.

Art, even in its lower forms, was hardly recogIn art. nized. The dramatic exhibitions, attempted at a late day in Boston, were instantly interrupted by the Puritan authorities, (1749.) In the towns and colonies more tolerant of amusement, there was nothing better than a strolling company, which was obliged to wander in turn from Newport to Williamsburg, (1752.) The first dramatic composition of the country was the Prince of Parthia, (1759,) a tragedy by Thomas Godfrey, a native of Philadelphia, whose poetic aspirations were much more successful than those of his countrymen before him. A few musical instruments, a piece or two of ordinary sculpture, a larger proportion of paintings, might be found in the more refined mansions. The first organ for a church encountered so great opposition in Boston that it remained unpacked for several months after its arrival from England, (1713.) Thirty years afterwards, an organ of considerable excellence was constructed in Boston itself by Edward Bromfield, (1745.) The musical publications of the period, beginning with "The Cantus or Trebles of twenty-eight Psalms,"

under the supervision of Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, (1710,) were chiefly confined to psalmody. Portrait painters were making their appearance; the first two, Watson and Smybert, being both from Scotland. John Singleton Copley, a native of Boston, and Benjamin West, a native of Springfield, in Pennsylvania, gave better promise of the art that was yet to walk in beauty through the nation.

Influen

abroad.

The intellectual progress of the colonies was ces from sensibly affected by influences from abroad. Not merely that the literature, the science and the art of other countries were within the reach of the new people, but that they were actually brought to its door, so to speak, by sojourners from beyond the sea. An English naturalist, Mark Catesby, was a visitor to Virginia and South Carolina, (1712-22.) A Swedish man of letters, Peter Kalm, travelled through all the central colonies, (1748-51.) His name still dwells amongst us in the kalmia, a genus of plants embracing our beautiful mountain laurel. A group of clerical visitors came at about the same time. George Berkeley, afterwards Bishop of Cloyne, spent some years (1729-31) at Newport, spreading around him the influences of a cultivated and a devout spirit. He tarried there on the way to the Bermudas, where he hoped in vain to found a college for the youth, Indian and English, of America. Georgia was visited by the Wesleys, John and Charles, (1736-37,) then just entering upon their efforts as reformers in the English church. George Whitefield, at first the churchman and then the sectary, traversed the whole land from north to south; his appeals to the people resulting in revivals, as the phrase went, which were repeated until the charm began to lose its power, but not before it had greatly loosened the hold of ancient doctrines, (1738–70.)

Liberality

Of all the progress that we have to notice, no in religion point is more remarkable than the increasing lib

66

erality in religion. It was beginning to be seen that men might be fellow-Christians without being fellow-churchmen or fellow-Puritans. Dissenters found toleration in the church-province of Virginia, (1698.) On the other hand, the Puritan churches made peace with their antagonists. Cotton Mather, preaching at the ordination of a Baptist, expresses our dislike of every thing which looked like persecution in the days that have passed over us," (1718.) Churchmen in Massachusetts were released from Puritan tithes, (1727.) Baptists and Quakers were both released from the same tithes in Massachusetts, (1728,) New Hampshire, (1729,) and Connecticut, (1729,) the last colony, however, continuing the restrictions upon separate places of worship. Even the Roman Catholics had their crumb of toleration. On their celebrating mass in Philadelphia, the governor proposed to enforce the penalties of the English, not the Pennsylvanian, law against them; but the council opposed the proceeding, on the ground that the Roman Catholics were protected in the charter of the colony, (1734.) The air seems to grow freer as we meet with such a record. But it was not yet purified. Charles Carroll, a Roman Catholic of Maryland, found himself so hemmed in by illiberality, that he petitioned the French government for a grant in Louisiana, (1751.)

Church of

The church of England -the moderate church England. of the reformation was the mean, as formerly described, between the extremes of the Roman and the Protestant sides. But, as the Roman church was hardly represented in the colonies, the church of England appeared to occupy, not so much a mean as an extreme position, the opposite to the extreme of Puritanism. It was, therefore,

the great foe of Puritanism, just as Puritanism was its great foe. Both the churchman and the Puritan found it hard to bear and to forbear with each other, the more so as