Captain, who was of a warm temper," adding, however, this beautiful sentiment in relation to the wretched race to which the victims of the expedition belonged," it would have been happy, if they had converted some before they had killed any." Inconceivable Fortune! Unimaginable Destiny! Inscruta ble Providence! Are these the details of an event from which such all-important, all-pervading influences were to flow? Were these the means, and these the men, through which, not New Plymouth only was to be planted, not New England only to be founded, not our whole country only to be formed and moulded, but the whole hemisphere to be shaped, and the whole world shaken? Yes, Fellow-Citizens, this was the event, these were the means, and these the men, by which these mighty impulses and momentous effects actually have been produced. And inadequate, unadapted, impotent, to such ends, as to all outward appearances they may seem, there was a power in them, and a Power over them, amply sufficient for their accomplishment, and the only powers that were thus sufficient. The direct and immediate influence of the passengers in the Mayflower, either upon the destinies of our own land or of others, may, indeed, have been less conspicuous than that of some of the New England colonists who followed them. But it was the bright and shining wake they left upon the waves, it was the clear and brilliant beacon they lighted upon the shores, that caused them to have any followers. They were the pioneers in that peculiar path of emigration which alone conducted to these great results. They, as was written to them by their brethren in the very outset of their enterprise, to break the ice for others, and theirs world's end!

they were the instruments shall be the honor unto the

When the Pilgrim Fathers landed upon Plymouth Rock, one hundred and twenty-eight years had elapsed since the discovery of the New World by Columbus. During this long period, the southern Continent of America had been the main scene of European adventure and enterprise. And richly had it repaid the exertions which had been made to subdue and settle it. The empires of Montezuma and the Incas had surrendered them

selves at the first summons before the chivalrous energies of Cortes and Pizarro, and Brazil had mingled her diamonds with the gold and silver of Mexico and Peru, to deck the triumphs and crown the rapacity of the Spaniard and the Portuguese.

But the northern Continent had been by no means neglected in the adventures of the day. Nor had those adventures been confined to the subjects of Portugal and Spain. The monarchs of those two kingdoms, indeed, emboldened by their success at the south, had put forth pretensions to the sole jurisdiction of the whole New Hemisphere. But Francis the First had well replied, that he should be glad to see the clause in Adam's Will which made the northern Continent their exclusive inheritance, and France, under his lead, had set about securing for herself a share of the spoils. It was under French patronage that John Verazzani was sailing in 1524, when the harbor of New York especially attracted his notice for its great convenience and pleasantness.

But England, also,-with better right than either of the others, claiming, as she could, under the Cabots, had not been inattentive to the opportunity of enlarging her dominions, and I have already alluded to sundry unsuccessful attempts which were made by the English to effect this object, during the reign and under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth.

Within a few months previous to the close of her reign and without her patronage, Bartholomew Gosnold added another to the list of these unavailing efforts, having only achieved for himself the distinction of being the first Englishman that ever trod what was afterwards known as the New England shore, and of having given to the point of that shore upon which he first set foot, the homely, but now endeared and honored title of Cape Cod.

Only a few years after the death of the Queen, however, these efforts were renewed with fresh zeal. As early as 1606, King James divided the Virginia of Elizabeth into two parts, and assigned the colonization of them to two separate companies, by one of which, and especially by its President, the Lord Chief Justice Popham, an attempt was immediately made to

settle the New England coast. A colony, indeed, was actually planted under his patronage, and under the personal lead of his brother, at Sagadahoc, near the mouth of the Kennebec River, in 1607. But it remained there only a single year, and was broken up under such disheartening circumstances the colonists, on their return, branding the country "as over cold and not habitable by our nation" - that the Adventurers gave up their designs.

Five or six years later, notwithstanding, in 1614, the famous Captain John Smith, who had already, under the auspices of the other of the two companies, established what afterwards proved to be, rather than really then was, a permanent settlement in southern Virginia, having founded Jamestown in 1607, was induced to visit and survey this Northern Virginia also, as it was then called. And after his return home, Captain Smith prepared and published a detailed account of the country with a map, calling it for the first time, and as if to secure for it all the favor which the associations of a noble name could bestow, New England, and giving a most glowing description of the riches, both of soil and sea, of forests and fisheries, which awaited the enjoyment of the settler. "For I am not so simple," said he, (fortunate, fortunate for the foundation of the country he was describing, such simplicity was at length discovered!) " for I am not so simple as to think that ever any other motive than wealth, will ever erect there a common weal, or draw company from their ease and humors at home to stay in New England."

During the following year this gallant and chivalrous seaman and soldier evinced the sincerity of the opinion which he had thus publicly expressed, as to the inviting character of the spot, by attempting a settlement there himself, and made two successive voyages for that purpose. But both of them were continued scenes of disappointment and disaster, and he, too, for whose lion-hearted heroism nothing had ever seemed too difficult, was compelled to acknowledge himself overmatched, and to abandon the undertaking.

And where now were the hopes of planting New England? The friends to the enterprise were at their wit's end. All that the patronage of princes, all that the combined energies of rich

and powerful corporations, all that the individual efforts of the boldest and most experienced private adventurers, stimulated by the most glowing imaginations of the gains which awaited their grasp, could do, had been done, and done in vain. Means and motives of this sort had effected nothing, indeed, on the whole North American Continent, after more than half a century of uninterrupted operation, but a little settlement at one extremity by the Spanish, (St. Augustine, in 1565,) a couple of smaller settlements at the other extremity by the French, (Port Royal, in 1605, and Quebec, in 1609,) and smaller and more precarious than either, the Jamestown settlement, about midway between the two; this last being the only shadow- and but a shadow it was of English colonization on the whole continent.

But the Atlantic coast of North America, and especially that part of it which was to be known as New England, was destined to date its ultimate occupation to something higher and nobler than the chivalry of adventurers, the greediness of corporations, or the ambition of kings. The lust of new dominion, the thirst for treasure, the quest for spoil, had found an ample field, reaped an overflowing harvest, and rioted in an almost fatal surfeit on the southern Continent. It might almost seem, in view of the lofty destinies which were in store for the northern, in contemplation of the momentous influences it was to exert upon the welfare of mankind and the progress of the world, as if Providence had heaped those treasures and clustered those jewels upon the soil of Peru and Mexico, to divert the interest, absorb the passions, cloy the appetite and glut the rapacity which were naturally aroused by the discovery of a New World. We might almost imagine the guardian Spirit of the Pilgrims commissioned to cast down this golden fruit, and strew this Hesperian harvest along the pathway of the newly awakened enterprise, to secure the more certainly for the subjects of its appointed care, the possession of their promised land their dowerless, but chosen Atalanta.

But I am anticipating an idea which must not be thus summarily dismissed, and to which I may presently find an opportunity to do better justice. Meantime, however, let me remark, that we are not left altogether to supernatural agency for at least

the secondary impulse under which New England was colonized. Nor were the earthly princes and potentates of whom I have already spoken,- Elizabeth, her Minister of Justice, and her successor in the throne, though so signally frustrated in all their direct endeavors to that end, without a most powerful, though wholly indirect and involuntary, influence upon its final accomplishment.

The daughter of Ann Bullen could not fail to cherish a most hearty and implacable hatred towards that Church, in defiance of whose thunders she was conceived and cradled, and in the eye and open declaration of which she was a bastard, a heretic, an outlaw, and a usurper. So far, at any rate, Elizabeth was a friend to the Reformation. But she had almost as little notion as her father, of any reformation which reached beyond releasing her dominions from the authority of the Pope, and establishing herself at the head of the Church. And, accordingly, the very first year of her reign was marked by the enactment of laws exacting, under the severest penalties, conformity to the doctrines and discipline of the English Church a policy which she never relinquished.

For a violation of these laws and others of subsequent enactment, but of similar import, a large number of persons in her kingdom, whose minds had been too thoroughly inspired with disgust for the masks and mummeries of Catholic worship, to be content with a bare renunciation of the temporal or spiritual authority of the Pope, were arrested, imprisoned, and treated with all manner of persecution. At least six of them were capitally executed, and two of these, as it happened, were condemned to death by that very Lord Chief Justice whom we have seen a few years afterwards at the head of the Plymouth Company, engaged in so earnest but unavailing an effort to colonize the New England coast. Little did he know that his part in that work had been already performed.

In an imaginary "dialogue between some young men born in New England, and sundry ancient men that came out of Holland and Old England," written in 1648, by Governor Bradford a name which before all others should be this day remembered with veneration - the young men are represented as asking of