PREDEATH COFFINS AND MONUMENTS. -(VOL. VIII., p. 210.)-The New York correspondent of the Philadelphia Press, says in his letter of Oct. 4: "An eccentric old

gentleman has at length deceased in this city, after a most practical preparation for death. Upwards of a dozen years ago, a little lot in Greenwood was fenced, and in its centre was

planted a marble shaft bearing aloft the effigy of this strange old gentleman. There it stood, quadrant in hand, braving all sorts of weather, and almost daily came to the lot this quiet old gentleman, mounted with a ladder to the foot of the effigy, and was lost in contemplation of the marble Self. Now the marble has outbraved and outlasted the weather-beaten old gentleman, and he is buried under the shaft which he took so much pride in rearing; which he watched and studied with so much reverence." He was some time since nearly entombed alive in it, the door having fallen while he was making his almost daily inspection. In fact he passed the night there, not being discovered till the next day.

anchored near what is now the Battery, and its presence produced most momentous results. In the summer of 1664 the Eastern coast was occupied by colonies of different nations,-England, France, and Holland. France had pushed her colonies along the St. Lawrence and Mississippi. England had kept closer to the coast and had settled the New England States, and further south midway between New England and Virginia were the settlements of the Batavian Republic, the New Netherland. He then gave an account of the early discoveries of this continent and referred to the establishment of the principle under Queen Elizabeth that the rights of European powers over their discoveries of savage lands must be sustained by actual occupation or they were void. He then recounted the early discoveries of Gosnold and Pring, and of English settlements in Virginia prior to the discovery by Hendrick Hudson of the river which now bears his name, in 1609. In 1613, the first Dutch trading establishments were founded at Manhattan, and the present city of Albany and the islands, coasts and rivers along the shore were soon explored. In 1614 the General Government of the Dutch Republic granted a charter to the owners of the vessels authorizing them exclusively to visit the region they had discovered, which was soon named "New Netherland," and in 1621 a West India Company was formed to govern "the fruitful and unsettled regions" in Africa and America it might occupy. Under this charter the new colony grew apace and Fort Amsterdam was built on the southern point of New York Island. In 1620 James the First of England sealed a patent for the colonization of "New England in America," but the terms of that charter clearly excepted New France and New Netherland. In the same year, a part of New England was colonized, but before the patent was sealed, and was soon succeeded by other English in Massachusetts Bay, Fres,h and Connecticut River and at New Haven and Rhode Island, all made under the general authority of the New England patent. In the meantime the Colony of New Netherland flourished, and its young metropolis was named New Amsterdam. Its government was vested in a Director and Council, and a Fiscal and Attorney General; and in 1647 Peter Stuyvesant began his service as Director-General which lasted until the conquest of the colony, and under his administration the colony prospered greatly, attracting numbers of emigrants from Europe and the adjoining colonies

After sketching the character of Peter Stuyvesant, Mr. Brodhead read the following prophecy, contained in a letter written to Stuyvesant by the East India Company in 1652:

"Promote commerce, whereby Manhattan must prosper, her population increase, her trade and navigation flourish. For when these once become permanently established; when the

ships of New Netherland ride on every part of the ocean, then numbers, now looking to that coast with eager eyes, will be allowed to embark for your island." Mr. Brodhead continued:

The prophecy was splendidly fulfilled. New Amsterdam rapidly grew in importance, and her foreign commerce soon began to rival her domestic trade. The first vessel ever built by Europeans in North America, after the Virginia of Sagadahoc,' in 1607, was Block's significantly styled Restless of Manhattan,' in 1614. One of the largest merchantmen in Christendom was constructed by her shipwrights in 1631. Strangers sought burghership in the rising metropolis, and the tongues of many nations resounded through her ancient winding streets. Like her prototype, New Amsterdam was always a city of the world.

The province of New Netherland was, indeed, the most advantageously situated region in North America. Its original limits included all the Atlantic coast between Delaware Bay and Montauk Point, and even farther east and north, and all the inland territory bounded by the Conneticut valley on the cost, the St. Lawrence and Ontario on the north, and the affluents of the Ohio, the Susquehanna, and the Delaware on the west and south. Within those bounds is the only spot on the continent whence issue divergent streams which find their outlets in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Atlantic ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Across the surface of the

province runs a chain of the Alleghanies, through which, in two remarkable chasms, the waters of the Delaware and Hudson flow southward to the sea. At the head of its tides, the Hudson, which its explorers appropriately called 'the Great River of the Mountains,' receives the current of the Mohawk, rushing in from the west. Through the valleys of these rivers, and across the neighboring lakes, the savage natives of the country tracked those pathways of travel and commerec which civilized science only adopted and improved. Along their banks soon grew up flourishing villages, contributing to the prosperity of the chief town, which, with unerring judgment, had been planted on the oceanwashed island of Manhattan. In addition to those superb geographical peculiarities, every variety of soil, abundant mineral wealth, nature teeming with vegetable and animal life, and a climate as healthful as it is delicious, made New Netherland the most attractive of all the European colonies in America. From the first it was always the chosen seat of empire.

"It was the wise decree Providence that of this magnificent region should first be occupied by the Batavian race. There was expanded the germ of a mighty cosmopolitan state, destined to exert a moral influence as happy as the physical peculiarities of its temperate territory were alluring. Yet the growth and prosperity of the Dutch province were fatal to its political life.

Cove

The envy of its neighbors was aroused. tousness produced an irrepressible desire of possession, which could only be appeased by its violent seizure by unscrupulous foes.

"If at this time Englishmen had any one national characteristic more strongly developed than another, it was jealousy of the Dutch. Strangely, too, this sentiment seemed to have grown with the growth of Puritanism. It was enough for the British islander that the continental Hollander spoke a language different from his own. It mattered not that Costar of Haarlem invented the art of arts; or that Grotius, Erasmus, Gronovius and Plancius among scholars, and Boerhave and Huygens among philosophers, and Rembrandt and Cuyp and Wouvermans among painters, were illustrious sons of the liberal republic. Even William the Silent and Barneveldt were of little account among insular Britons-divided from all the rest of the world.' Coarse wit and flippant ridicule were continually employed in educating the Englishman to undervalue and dislike the Hollander.

"On the other hand, Holland, at the zenith of her power, was not jealous of England. The Dutch maxim was "Live and let live."

The speaker here gave a graphic account of the general features of the colony and its prosperity, and which drew on it the covetous eyes of England and of the jealousy existing in the minds of Englishmen of the Dutch. This jealousy was reproduced and exaggerated in the breasts of the colonists of the New Englanders especially. From the time of the first intercourse between Manhattan and New-Plymouth, the latter always pertinaciously insisted that the Dutch Colonists were "intruders." Gradually they crowded on westward at the Connecticut river until, in 1650, it was agreed between Stuyvesant and the New-England authorities that the Eastern boundary of New-Netherland should be Oyster Bay, on Long Island, and a line running northerly from Greenwich on the continent. Cromwell attempted to seize these territories, but, by the treaty of 1654, he recognized the right of Holland to the New-Netherland, and in 1656 the States General ratified the colonial boundary agreed on in 1650, but the British government evaded all engagement on the subject. Mr. Brodhead then recounted the subjugation of parts of Long Island by the Connecticut settlers, and the steps taken by the Director to guard against the dangers threatening the province by calling an assembly of deputies from the different towns at New-Amsterdam, in the Spring of 1664. Urgent appeals were addressed to the West India Company, but without avail, the Company thinking more of their commercial interests than those of the nation. In 1664 the States-General, however, desired the British Government to order the HIST. MAG. VOL. VIII. 48

restitution of the places seized by the English colonists; but the Ambassador, Sir George Donning, startled the Grand Pensionary by declaring that the New-Netherlanders were "the encroachers" upon New-England. A council for Foreign Plantations was formed by the English Government, stringent navigation laws passed, and Lord Stirling complained that the Dutch had intruded into I ong Island, which had been granted to his grandfather. On March 12, 1664, Charles II. granted a patent to James the Duke of York, giving him exclusive right over large portions of New Netherland, and authorizing him to expel all persons settled there without his licences. The Duke of York commissoned Col. Robert Nichols to act as his Deputy, and commissioned four vessels of war and embarked in them about 450 veterans commanded by officers in the English army. The expedition set sail from Portsmouth in the middle of May for Gardiner's Bay, Long Island. The States-General were informed of these movements, but replied to Stuyvesant that they were intended to instal some bishops in New-England. The ships arrived at Boston and there the squadron was strongly re-enforced by a number of Massachusetts and Connecticut settlers, and Indians held in reserve. Long Island peaceably submitted to the government of the Duke of York and sent auxiliaries to the English forces. Stuyvesant was absent when the squadron reached New-York, but hurried back to find the harbor blockaded, and that no aid could be got from Long Island. The regular garrison did not exceed 150, and its supply of powder was short. The burghers were more anxious to protect their property than to save the town; nevertheless, Stuyvesant determined to hold out. Nicholls summoned the town to surrender, and the people of the town, who had learned the liberal offers he made of protection to their persons, properties, and liberties, became mutinous. The squadron came up from its anchorage at Gravesend to New-Amsterdam, and landed five companies of regular soldiers at Governor's Island, and at last the entreaties of the principal inhabitants prevailed on Stuyvesant to surrender the town, which only had fifteen hundred inhabitants. Six commissioners were appointed to negotiate the terms of surrender; which were, that the inhabitants were to continue free denizens, and were guaranteed their property. These were explained to the people on the following Sunday, at the close of the afternoon service, and it was agreed that the New-England troops should be kept on the Brooklyn side of East River, the burghers being more apprehensive of them than the others. On the 8th of September, 1664, the garrison marched off with flying colors, and the English took possession of the town, and occupied the city gates and the Town Hall, and the name of the city was altered to New-York. Soon

after, Fort Orange, now Albany, surrendered, and the Dutch fort of Newcastle, on the Deleware, was taken by the English thus completing the reduction of the New-Netherland.

The speaker then discussed at considerable length the effects of the conquest of New-Netherland, which he denounced as a most wanton and unjust aggression on the part of England, and which, prompted solely by her greed and last of power, had been justly punished by the overthrow of her power on the American Continent in the succeeding century, and to which the conquest of New-Netherland had greatly contributed.

The orator proceeded to show the baseness of the conquest of New Netherland, and continued: "Yet unjustifiable as was the deed, the temptation to commit it was irresistible. Its actual execution was only a question of time. It could not have been prevented, unless the Dutch government were prepared to renounce their previous policy, and hold New Netherland at every hazard against the might of all enemies.

*

* * "If England had not seized New Netherland when she did, France would almost certainly have taken and held it, not long afterwards, in the Dutch war of 1672. * * * It was for the true interest of America that New York was founded by Holland. It made her the magnanimous and cosmopolitan state which she now is, and whose national influence has been so happy and healthful. Providence never meant our great country to perpetuate the ideas of only one nationality in the old world, or of but one of its plantations in the new. The arrogant claim-so flattering to British pride, so sycophantic in Americans who would flatter England that the United States of America are of wholly Anglo-Saxon origin, is as fallacious as it is vul

gar.

'Time's noblest offspring' was not the child of England alone. There was a fatherland as fruitful as the motherland. There were many parents of our multigeneous people. The great modern republic sprung from a union of races as various and contrasted as the climates to which they emigrated. Sweden, Holland, Germany, Savoy, Spain, France, Scotland, and Ireland, all co-operated, no less mightily than England, in peopling our territory, moulding our institutions, and creating our vast and diversified country 'one and indivisible.' To its heterogeneousness, and not to its supposed homogeneousness to its collisions and its comminglings of races to its compromises and its concessionsdoes that country owe its grandest moral, social and political characteristics."

Mr. Brodhead then sketched the character of the Dutch emigrants, and of the other colonists who settled in New Netherland, showing the changes which followed the English conquest, through which all the old Dutch influence survived. After alluding to the injustice done to

New York in many American school books and histories, he concluded his oration as follows:

"The retirement of Holland from the unequal strife left France and Spain to contend with England for colonial supremacy in North America. Mistress of all the Atlantic coast between Nova Scotia and Florida, the power which had conquered New York soon aspired to uncontrolled dominion from sea to sea. The acquisition of New Netherland, which had formerly kept Virginia apart from New England, gave to the British crown the mastery of the most advantageous positions on the continent, whence it could at pleasure, direct movements against any colony that might attempt a premature independence With short-sighted triumph England rejoiced that her authority was dotted on a new spot in in the map of the world. But her pride went before her destruction, and her haughty spirit prepared the way for her terrible humiliation. The American republic was fashioned in the first Congress of 1765, which met at New York. It was a most significant but only a just decree of Providence, that the retribution of England should begin with the very province which she bad so iniquitously ravished from Holland, to set, as her most splendid jewel, in the diadem of her colonial sovereignty.

"Yet for a long time the plantations, which had thus become geographically united, were neither homogeneous nor sympathetic, and they never were actually consolidated. While New England, Maryland and Virginia were radically Anglo-Saxon colonies, the mass of the popolation of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, which had formed the later territory of New Netherland, was, as we have seen, made up of Hollanders, Huguenots, Waldenses, Germen, Frenchmen, Swedes, Scotchmen and Irishmen. A similar want of homogeneousness characterized some of the more southern colonies. Among these manifold nationalities, ideas and motives of action were as various and discordant as the different dialects which were uttered. In the progress of years a common allegiance and common dangers produced a greater sympathy among the English plantations in America,

Nevertheless, while she formed a part of the British colonial empire, New York never lost her original social identity, nor her peculiar political influence. Her moral power lasted throughout the whole succession of events which culminated in the American Revolution. Nor has her salutary influence ever ceased. The history of her fatherland, besides the idea of toleration of opinion, furnished the example of the confederation of free and independent states, and made familiar the most instructive lessons of constitutional administration. While that history taught the sacred right of revolt against the tyrany of an hereditary king, it enforced the no less sacred duty of faithfulness to deliberate obligations and