Part 23

The _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1740 contains a short and quaint paper by Dr. Johnson, in which he transcribes some supposed fragments of a Roman gazette for the year 168 B.C. These were first published in 1615, and in 1692 were defended by Dodwell, but are now recognized as fifteenth-century forgeries. We have no genuine fragments of the Roman gazettes. None the less, Johnson’s comparison of them with the English newspapers of 1740 may well suggest a reflection. The Roman gazette under the Empire did not give the transactions of the Senate, any more than it admitted political comment. In the newspapers of Johnson’s time, the parliamentary reports were still very irregular and imperfect; while criticism of public men was fain to take the disguise, however thin, of allegory. Thus the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ regaled its readers, from month to month, with “Proceedings and Debates in the Senate of Lilliput.” It was when the House of Commons had ceased to represent the public opinion of the country, that this opinion became resolved to have an outlet in the press. Parliament having ceased to discharge its proper function, the press became the popular court of appeal. The battle for a free press, in the full modern sense, was fought out between 1764 and 1771—beginning in 1764 with the persecution of Wilkes for attacking Bute in the _North Briton_, and ending with the successful resistance, in 1771, to the proclamation by which the Commons had forbidden the publication of their debates. Six printers, who had infringed it, were summoned to the bar of the House; five obeyed; and the messenger of the House was sent to arrest the sixth. The Lord Mayor of London sent the messenger to prison. The House of Commons sent the Lord Mayor to the Tower. But he was followed by cheering crowds. He was released at the next prorogation; and the day on which he left the Tower marked the end of the last attempt to silence the press. The next few years saw the beginning of the first English journals which exercised a great political and social power. The _Times_ dates from 1788. Thus a period memorable for Americans has something of analogous significance for their kinsmen in England. For the English people, also, those years contained a Declaration of Independence; they brought us a title-deed of freedom greater, perhaps, than the barons of the thirteenth century extorted from John—the charter of a complete freedom in the daily utterance of public opinion.

The attempt here has been to indicate some of the partial equivalents for such an utterance which may be traced in classical literature. A student of antiquity must always in one sense, resemble the wistful Florentine who, with Virgil for his guide, explored the threefold realm beyond the grave. His converse is with the few, the spirits signal for good or for evil in their time; the shades of the great soldiers pass before him,—he can scan them closely, and imagine how each bore himself in the hour of defeat or victory on earth; he can know the counsels of statesmen, and even share the meditations of their leisure; the poets and the philosophers are present: but around and beyond these are the nameless nations of the dead, the multitudes who passed through the ancient world and left no memorial. With these dim populations he can hold no direct communion; it is much as if at times the great movements which agitated them are descried by him as the surging of a shadowy crowd, or if the accents of their anguish or triumph are borne from afar as the sound of many waters. So much the more, those few clear voices which still come from the past are never more significant than when they interpret the popular mind of their generation. The modern development of representative institutions has invested the collective sentiment of communities with power of a kind to which antiquity can furnish no proper parallel. But this fact cannot dispense the student of history from listening for the echoes of the market-place. And such attention cannot fail to quicken our sense of the inestimable gain which has accrued to modern life through journalism. It is easy to forget the magnitude of a benefit when its operation has become regular and familiar. The influence of the press may sometimes be abused; its tone may sometimes be objectionable. But take these three things—quickness in seeking and supplying information,—continual vigilance of comment,—electric sympathy of social feeling: where in the ancient world do we find these things as national characteristics, except in so far as they were gifts of nature to the small community of ancient Athens—gifts to which her best literature owes so much of its incomparable freshness and of its imperishable charm? It is mainly due to the agency of the press that these things are now found throughout the world,—these, which, in all lands where man has risen above barbarism, are the surest safeguards of civilization and the ultimate pledges of constitutional freedom.—_Fortnightly Review._

THREE GLIMPSES OF A NEW ENGLAND VILLAGE.

Does the reader chance to know that bit of England round about Haslemere, but an hour and a half’s journey from the heart of London, where three counties meet, and the traveller may see at a glance, from many a hill-top, the most rich and beautiful parts of Sussex, the wildest and most picturesque of Surrey and Hampshire? At his feet lies spread the weald of Sussex, whilst the dark wooded promontories and long purple ridges of Blackdown, Marley, and Ironhill curve round or jut out into this broad sea of fertility, and the distant South Downs close the view with wavy outline and fluted sides, bare of everything save fine turf, nibbling sheep, and the shadows of the clouds. Turning round, Surrey culminates, as it were, in Hind Head, with triple summit—no mere hill, but a miniature mountain in bold individuality of form. And when he climbs this vantage-ground, Hampshire lies unfolded before him as well as Surrey; Wolmer Forest—forest no longer, but brown moorland; ranges of chalk hills, conspicuous among them one with a white scar on its dark flank, which hides Selborne amid its trees; solemn distances seen against the sunset sky, clothed with a deep purple bloom, which haunt the memory like a strain of noble music.

No less beautiful and strikingly similar in general character is that part of Western Massachusetts wherein stands our New England village—Northampton—village in size and rural aspect, though the capital of Hampshire county. But the New England valley has one advantage over the weald of Sussex in its broad and beautiful river, with Indian name, Connecticut—Quonnektacut, the long river—which winds through it. Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom, the Sugar Loaf and the Pelham range are its Blackdown, Marley, Hind Head, and South Downs. These hills are a couple of hundred feet or so higher than their English prototypes, ranging from 1000 to 1300 feet above the sea, and their old ribs are of harder and more ancient stuff than the chalk and greensand of the South Downs and Surrey hills; witness the granite or rather gneiss boulders scattered broadcast over the land, sometimes in rugged upright masses, looking like some grey ruin, sometimes in small rounded fragments, bestrewing the uplands like a flock of sheep, and more rarely the black and still harder blocks of trap. In the museum at Amherst, just over the river, are preserved slabs with the famous bird-tracks—colossal footprints two feet long, found in the trias of this part of the Connecticut valley—all tending to prove that the sun shone down upon dry land here for some ages whilst the mother-country was still mostly a waste of waters; and that, geologically speaking, and so far as these parts at any rate are concerned, New England is old, and old England new, by comparison. Broad, fertile, level meadows border the river, and the hills are richly clothed with chestnut, birch, hemlock (somewhat like the yew in aspect), hickory (a kind of walnut), beech, oak, etc. It is hard to say whether the likeness or the unlikeness to an English landscape strikes the traveller more. There is the all-pervading difference of a dry and brilliant atmosphere, which modifies both form and color, substituting the sharp-edged and definite for the vague and rounded in distant objects, and brilliancy and distinctness of hue for depth and softness. Apart, too, from the brilliant and searching light, the leaves are absolutely of a lighter green, and grow in a less dense and solid mass; the foliage looks more feathery, the tree more spiral. Especially is this so with the American oak, which has neither the dome-like head, the sturdiness of bough, nor the dark bluish-green foliage of the English oak. If it be spring-time, no gorse is to be seen with golden blossom set among matted thorns, perfuming the sunshine; but everywhere abounding masses of the delicate pink-clustered, odorless, warlike kalmia, called there laurel, and growing to the full size of our laurels; and more shyly hidden, the lovely azalea or swamp-pink, as the country people call it. Instead of the daisy, the delicate little Housatonia, like Venus’ looking-glass but growing singly, stars the ground; and for fragrance we must stoop down and seek the pale pink clusters of the trailing arbutus or May-flower, which richly reward the seeker. In July we miss the splendid purpling of the hills with heather blossom; but the pink spikes of the hardhack abound; gay lilies, lady’s earrings, blue-fringed gentians, glowing cardinal flowers (_Lobelia cardinalis_), with slender petals of a deeper crimson than the salvia, and a host more new friends, or old friends with new ways grown democratic as befits them, scatter their beauty freely by the wayside and the margins of the brooks, instead of setting up as exclusives of the garden.

Nor are the differences less marked in the aspect of the cultivated land. The fertile valley has perhaps a look of greater breadth from not being intersected with hedges and having few fences of any kind, one crop growing beside another, and one owner’s beside another’s, like different beds in a nursery-garden. But the effect of these large undivided fields is to dwarf the appearance of the crops themselves. The patches of tall tasselled Indian corn, the white-blossomed buckwheat, and large-leaved tobacco, look diminutive. No haystacks, no wheat-ricks are to be seen; only here and there a lonely, prison-like tobacco barn or drying-house, full of narrow loopholes to let in air without light. Everything else is housed in the big barn that adjoins the farmhouse, which stands, not amid its own fields, but on the outskirts of the nearest town or village. Of wheat little is grown; of root-crops still less, for sheep-farming is not in favor. Tobacco, with its large, glossy dark leaves, like those of the mangel-wurzel, thrives well on the rich alluvial soil of the Connecticut valley; but, fluctuating as it is in value, exhaustive of the soil, and easily damaged by weather, the great gains of one year are often more than counterbalanced by the losses of the next. The Indian corn remains long upon the ground in autumn after it is cut, to ripen in stooks, much as beans do with us; and then come to light the pumpkins which were sown amongst it, and now lie basking and glowing in the sun like giant oranges. Glowing, too, in the splendid sunshine, are the apple-orchards, laden with fruit half as large and quite as red as full-blown peonies. Never, even in the vale of Evesham or Herefordshire, have I seen any so beautiful.

As to the living creatures—feathered, four legged, or no-legged—there are some conspicuous differences which it does not take a naturalist to discover. Ten to one, indeed, if we come upon a rattlesnake; but a few are still left in snug corners of Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom, as anxious to avoid us as we them. The lively little chipmunk, diminutive first cousin to the squirrel, with black stripe along the back, is sure to make our acquaintance, for his kind seems as multitudinous as the rabbit with us, and is a worse foe to the farmer, because he has more audacity and a taste for the kernels of things, instead of merely the leaves. Strange new sounds greet the ear from katydid “working her chromatic reed”; from bull-frog with deep low, almost a roar; from grasshoppers and locusts, whose loud brassy whirr resounds all through the sunny hours with such persistency it seems at last a very part of the hot sunshine. The chirp of our grasshoppers is the mere ghost of a sound in comparison. At night fireflies glance in and out of the darkness; and, if we remain under the trees, mosquitoes soon make us unpleasantly aware of their existence. As to the birds, the flame-colored oriole, the delicately shaped blue-bird, flit by now and then as flashes of surprise and delight from the south; the rose-breasted grossbeak has a sweet note; the robin, not round as a ball and fierce and saucy, but grown tall, and slim, and mild—his breast not so red, his song not so sweet, his eye not so bright—is there. He is indeed a robin only in name,—really a species of thrush. A cheerful twittering, chirping, whistling, the tuning of the orchestra, a short sweet snatch or two of song I heard; but the steady, long-sustained outpour of rich melody from throats never weary, the chorus trilling joyously, with which our woods and hedgerows resound in spring and early summer, I listened for in vain. Perhaps the pathlessness of the woods and hills prevented my penetrating to the secluded haunts of the sweetest singers, such as the hermit-thrush, and I speak only of New England. Remembering what John Burroughs has said on the subject, I will not venture to generalize the comparison.

GLIMPSE THE FIRST.

About two hundred and forty years ago, towards the close of Cromwell’s life, and thirty-four years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, the Boston and Plymouth Settlement found itself vigorous enough to send out offshoots; and having heard from the Dutch settlers of New York of this rich and well-watered valley discovered by them in 1614, the General Court appointed John Pynchon, Elizur Holyoke, and Samuel Chapin of Springfield, settled seventeen years before, to negotiate with the Indians for that tract of land called Nonotuck, where now stand six small towns and villages, chief and first built of which was Northampton. The price paid was a hundred fathoms of wampum (equal to about £20), ten coats, some small gifts, and the ploughing up of sixteen acres on the east side of the river. Wampum (Indian for white) consisted of strings of beads made of white shells and _suckauhock_ black or blue money, of black or purple shells. Both were used for more purposes than trading with the Indians, coin being scarce. Eight white and four black beads were worth a penny; and a man as often took out a string of beads as a purse to pay an innkeeper or a ferryman, or to balance a trading account.

But Nonotuck was paid for with a good deal besides the wampum and the ploughing. For a hundred and twenty-four years there was almost incessant warfare with the Indians. Treacherous ambuscades lay in wait for the trader on his journey, stealthy dark-skinned assassins for the solitary husbandman, and not a few of these fertile fields were watered by the blood of its first tillers. He carried his weapons with him to his work and to the meeting-house, and expressed his gratitude for hair-breadth escapes, Puritan fashion, by the pious names he gave his children. Preserved Clapp, Submit Grout, Comfort Domo, Thankful Medad, are names that figure in the records of this and the neighboring villages; where we read also that one Praise-Ever Turner, and his servant Uzackaby Shakspeare, were killed by the Indians. Within sight of Northampton it was, just over the river, in the sister settlement of Hadley,—that beautiful old village, with street eighteen rods wide, set with a double avenue of superb elms, greensward in the middle and a road on either side, looking more like the entrance to a fine park than a village street,—here it was that a “deliverance” occurred, long believed by the people to have been miraculous. One Sunday, when nearly the whole scant population was gathered for worship in the meeting-house, a large body of Indians fell upon them, and, what with the panic and the want of a leader, all seemed lost, when a majestic, venerable figure, dressed in a strange rich garb, fully armed, appeared suddenly in their midst, assumed the command, rallied their scattered numbers, and led them on to victory; then vanished as suddenly as he had appeared, no man knew where or whence.[61] No man but one—Mr. Russell, the minister. This venerable apparition was Goffe, once a general in Cromwell’s army, and, like Whalley his companion in exile, one of the judges who condemned Charles to death, now forced, even in that far land, to hide for his life, since an active quest was maintained, in obedience to the Home Government for both Goffe and Whalley. For twelve years did good Mr. Russell shelter them, unknown to all but his own family. Whalley died in his house; but Goffe subsequently disappeared, and the rest of his career is unknown.

Altogether the hardy band found ample scope for carrying into practice the noble maxim of the Pilgrim Fathers rehearsed at Leyden: “All great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.” In order to secure protection from Indians and wolves, the little community built its dwellings, not each isolated on its own farm-lands, but side by side, so as to form at once the main street; each house having its “home lot” or strip of “interval,” as the rich meadow-land stretching down to the river was called, and its “wood-lot” on the hillside. Having chosen her “select men to direct all the fundamental affairs of the town, to prevent anything which they judge shall be of damage, and to order anything which shall be for the good of the town; to hear complaints, arbitrate controversies, lay out highways, see to the scouring of ditches, the killing of wolves, and the training of children,” Northampton proceeded at once to build herself a meeting-house “of sawen timber 26 feet long and 18 feet wide,” for the sum of £14 sterling, to be paid in work or corn. There was no clock in the settlement; so the worshippers were called together, sometimes by a large cow-bell, sometimes by drum, and finally by trumpet, for the blowing of which Jedediah Strong had a salary of eighteen shillings a year. There was no minister for some years; and more finding in themselves a vocation for preaching than for listening, or at any rate for criticising than for meekly imbibing, disputes arose, the General Court was appealed to, and its decision enforced that the service should consist, besides praying and singing, of “the reading aloud of known godly and orthodox books;” and for those who failed to obey with seemly decorum the summons of Mr. Jedediah Strong’s trumpet, severe was the chastisement. Joe Leonard and Sam Harmon, for instance, “who were seen to whip and whisk one another with a stick before the meeting-house door,” were fined five shillings; and Daniel, “for idle watching about and not coming to the ordinances of the Lord,” was adjudged worthy of stripes to the number “of five, _well laid on_.” In 1672 the town voted that there be some sticks set up in the “meeting-house, with fit persons placed near, to use them as occasion shall require, to keep the youth from disorder.” Which staves were fitted with a hare’s foot at one end and his tail at the other; the former to give a hard rap to misbehaving boys, the latter a gentle reminder to sleeping women.

Something besides repression was done, however, for the benefit of the youth of Northampton. The first school was started in 1663,—the master to receive £6 a year and his charges for tuition. Bridges were built and roads made by calling out every man to labor according to his estate; and those who did not labor paid in grain at the rate of half-a-crown a-day for exemption. For more than sixty years Northampton had no doctor, only a “bone-setter”: on the whole, a lucky circumstance, perhaps, considering what were the remedies then chiefly in vogue. Sylvester Judd, from whose “History of Hadley,” and also from Dr. Holland’s “History of Western Massachusetts,” the foregoing details have been gathered, gives a curious list, taken from medical prescriptions of the time:—the fat of a wild cat, blood of a goat, of an ass, of a white pigeon taken from under the wing, the tongue and lungs of a fox, liver of an eel and of a wolf, horns of a bug (beetle), teeth of a sea-horse, bone from the heart of a stag, the left foot of a tortoise, &c.

After the Indian and the French and Indian wars were over, there was but a short interval of rest before the War of Independence began. The long rugged battle with the savage and the wilderness had done its work well in training men for the struggle which was to sunder all bonds, and convert the colony into a new nation, master of its own destiny. Northampton was not the scene of any battles; but bore its part in furnishing some brave and leading men, and money, or money’s worth, to the army. After the war was over, came a time of depression and disorganization in public affairs and in trade, which culminated hereabouts in what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, so named from its leader; but it was soon quelled, and peace and prosperity settled down upon Northampton and upon the whole land.

GLIMPSE THE SECOND.

If we lift a corner of the veil of time at the opening of the present century, we find our handful of settlers become a population of 4000,—there was no immigration in those days to swell the numbers by thousands and tens of thousands at a blow,—and possessed of resources for their social and intellectual welfare pretty much on a par with those of an English country town at that date of the same size: a little behind still in material comforts and luxuries, a little ahead in the amount of mental activity and the spirit of progress generated partly by more complete self-dependence, by the great and stirring times men had just passed through, and by hereditary influence from the parent stock, which was the pick of Old England in these qualities.

The spirit of fellowship thrives where all are fellow-workers. There comes, it would seem, a happy transition time between the struggles, privations, isolation of the pioneers, and the wealth, luxury, and poverty (grim skeleton in the cupboard of advancing prosperity), when there yet remains a good measure of that sense of neighborship necessarily developed, when no man is independent of the free help and good-will of others, no man is born with a silver spoon in his mouth,—a time, in short, when sociability is and “society” is not, and those to whom the lines have fallen in pleasant places can stretch out a friendly hand to the less fortunate without suspicion of condescension or patronage.

For sample, we will take a single group, the door of whose hospitable house has been set open for us by the privately printed memoirs of Mrs Anne Jean Lyman. The inmates are a judge, his wife, and a large family of children of all ages, for he has been twice married. The judge is a genuine product of the soil, his family having for at least three generations back been settled in Northampton. His wife, who is from the neighborhood of Boston, of Scotch ancestry on one side, and on the other descended from Anne Hutchinson (the eloquent woman-preacher, who, banished for heterodoxy from their settlement by the Pilgrim Fathers, was killed by the Indians in 1643), may be taken as a good but typical instance of the New England woman of that day—capable, practical, aspiring, intellectual, friendly above all.