of Normandy, had bequeathed a small patrimony to his son. The youth had, after a careful and classical preliminary education, entered himself at Clifford's Inn, and after completing his studies had been called to the bar. Here he might have prospered, and for aught we know have risen to be Lord Keeper, if, as he facetiously expressed it, he had been blessed with the faculty of keeping any thing—or rather, he would add, if he had not been addicted to keeping too much. He kept horses, hounds, and hawks, every thing in short, but his terms and his money. His career was brilliant but brief. His patrimony was soon exhausted. His creditors became impatient. Endowed with a teeming imagination, a sanguine temperament, and a vigorous constitution, he was suddenly inflamed with the desire of making a bold dash at fortune in the El Dorado of the west. The adventures of Raleigh, the romantic achievements of that poetical captain with the prosaic name of John Smith, all the accounts brought by hundreds of nameless voyagers to the new world, captivated his fancy. To a man beset by Jews at home, the Gentiles of the wilderness had no terrors. He had but few guineas left to sow, and he found England growing barren and fallow. He determined to transplant himself for a season into a new atmosphere and a new soil. Bright visions fluttered like golden singing birds around his midnight pillow. It was the fever of the age. It is difficult to realize the infatuation of certain classes of men at that day. The chimeras which were rampant in that century have been destroyed. Each age, like Saturn, devours its own children. The feudal sovereignties, palatinates, bishoprics, manorial lordships, with all the tinsel and glittering circumstance which are getting to be but threadbare patchwork even in olden countries, have left hardly a rag upon a bush in the western wilderness. When Beauchamp Plantagenet,* of Belvil, in New Albion or

* See Note I.

New England, Esquire, published his letters "to his suzerain lord, the right honorable and mighty Lord Edmond, by Divine Providence lord proprietor, earl palatine, governor and captaingeneral of the Province of New Albion," and gave the most minute directions towards planting and establishing a magnificient piece of secondhand feudality in the wilderness, he did not seem a whit ridiculous. Neither Beauchamp Plantagenet nor Thomas Morton were ridiculous, because they misapprehended the character of the movement which was setting towards America. They were wrong, and Thomas Morton suffered for his misapprehension of time, place, and circumstance, but these dreams spun their cobweb meshes around many vivid brains. Morton grew tired of Clifford's Inn, the charms of the Lord Keepership were dwarfed in long perspective. His debts harassed him. His mistresses and his friends went off with each other, leaving him to muse upon the instability of love and friendship. An unlucky duel, in which he was so unfortunate as desperately to wound an antagonist, whose friends were more powerful than his sword, came to add to his difficulties. He saw himself plunging from one scrape to another, with no hope of extrication. And so, rapidly converting all that was left of his patrimony into money, he suddenly embarked for America, some half dozen years before the period at which we have presented him to the reader.

He had at first found himself in Virginia; thence he had wandered in a northerly direction—had visited and quarrelled with the colonists of New Plymouth - had been with Mr. Weston's colony at Wessaguscus with Captain Gorges- and afterwards with Captain Wollaston, at Mount Wollaston. Wollaston, who was a man of station, had engaged with him, in his undertaking, a few adventurers of his own rank, among whom was Morton, and had brought with him a large number of persons bound to servitude, after the manner of the day, besides artifi

cers, mechanics and agriculturists, sufficient in his estimation to establish a colony upon a large scale. It is needless to say that religion had no part in this movement; and it is a striking fact, that of the many colonies attempted in Massachusetts, none succeeded except those which were planned and supported by religious enthusiasm. Mr. Weston's colony had dissolved within a year from its origination.

Captain Wollaston, who had planted himself very near his predecessors, in the neighborhood of the hill which still perpetuates his name, and who had been joined by the stragglers still remaining from previous settlements in the vicinity, found himself at the head of a disorderly and somewhat unmanageable crew, and becoming discouraged, soon retired to Virginia, taking with him a portion of his servants. The others remained under the nominal jurisdiction of one Filcher, whom he had appointed as his lieutenant, for the express purpose of conducting them to Virginia. It was now that Morton displayed his genius. Possessing a certain share in the adventure, he determined to make himself master of the whole colony. Inflaming the colonists with artful speeches, in which he warned them that they were about to be transported to Virginia, to be sold as slaves, and held out to them alluring prospects of wealth and good living if they rallied under his dominion, and remained where they were, he easily made them the instruments of his plan. Morton was eloquent, adroit, bold, good-humored, and luxurious and loose in his habits and principles. The motley troop of adventurers desired nothing better than to serve such a commander. They therefore exchanged their servitude to Captain Wollaston for a nondescript vassalage to Esquire Morton. He ruled them absolutely, for they were accustomed to be governed, and he possessed a superiority of intellect, education and character, which soon gave him unbounded dominion over them. His establishment at Mount Wollaston, the name

of which, upon his elevation to the sovereignty, he had changed to Merry-Mount, became a central point of attraction for all the straggling survivors of the different trading plantations which had been begun and abandoned during the previous few years. But while he seemed only bent upon the accumulation of wealth, by means principally of the beaver trade and of the fisheries, which he proposed to establish; and while his days were passed at Merry-Mount in a round of hunting and carousing; he in fact, in company with some other kindred spirits, was nourishing still bolder and more subtle schemes.

Among the original and most ardent encouragers of plantations in America, was a certain Sir Ferdinando Gorges, at that time Governor of Plymouth in old England. He was a knight of ancient family and large possessions, a devoted royalist, a bigot for church and state, and an ardent believer in the possibility of establishing vast and flourishing manorial and proprietary colonies in America, and particularly in New England. He had already expended large sums in attempts at colonization, the only fruit of which, then apparent, was an infant colony at Piscataqua, which he had founded in company with a Captain John Mason, and whither David Thompson, a Scottish gentleman of education, had been sent as governor, some years previously to the period in which our story opens. Thompson, however, not fascinated by the savage charms of Sagadehock, had soon retired from his satrapcy and established himself upon the island which still bears his name. Not only Morton, Gardiner, Thompson, of Thompson's Island, and Walford, but still other inhabitants of Massachusetts, of widely differing characters and pursuits, seemed united in some common purpose, and bound by a secret tie to Sir Ferdinando.

To the Plymouth brethren, Morton was a thorn which they endeavored incessantly to pluck out and cast from them. His whole existence seemed to them an insult, so utterly were his

character and principles opposed to their own, while at the same time their uneasiness seemed to have a deeper cause. His manner of dealing with the Indians, also, gave the Puritans, great annoyance. Fully impressed with that grand characteristic of most Englishmen, a self-relying consciousness of national superiority, he treated the aborigines with a frank and cheerful contempt, which was not without its philosophy. Where two nations are mixed together, he would say, one or the other must rule. He therefore assumed, at starting, a careless, graceful superiority, which rather astonished the natives, but in the end convinced them that he was a great sachem, whom they ought willingly to obey. He was never deluded into any enthusiasm for savage dignity or poetry, but found the Rising Moon, the Floating Cloud of the North-west, and the indomitable Buffalo, all very useful fellows to supply him with beaver and deerskins, and rewarded them according to their activity in his service, without any regard to the splendor of their lineage, or their private exploits of heroism.

The Indians, in the vicinity of Morton's residence, were peaceable in the main, well disposed towards the English, and more afraid of the encroachments of the Tarentines of the East, and the Pequods of the West, than of the pale-faced strangers, to whom they looked up for protection as to superior beings. Morton took the best advantage of this disposition. He taught a few of them the use of fire-arms. But a still more potent agent in his scheme of dominion, he found in that gigantic engine of mischief which was so destructive to these children of the forest. That wizard power, like the genie of the Arabian fisherman, was imprisoned in a bottle. By these means Morton had extended his system of semi-vassalage from his white subordinates over the Indians also. His horizon opened as he advanced. He was already grown to be a man of power

and consequence.

The Indians brought him in great store of