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months, he was compelled to abdicate, and fly for his life. In 1354 he was reinstated in power, but his tyranny caused his assassination the same year.

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The Ursini were one of the noble families of Rome. This lesson is especially adapted for drill on inflection, emphasis, and modulation.

LVII. CHARACTER OF THE PURITAN FATHERS OF NEW

ENGLAND.

ONE of the most prominent features which distinguished our forefathers, was their determined resistance to oppression. They seemed born and brought up for the high and special purpose of showing to the world that the civil and religious rights of man-the rights of self-government, of conscience, and independent thought—are not merely things to be talked of and woven into theories, but to be adopted with the whole strength and ardor of the mind, and felt in the profoundest recesses of the heart, and carried out into the general life, and made the foundation of practical usefulness, and visible beauty, and true nobility.

Liberty, with them, was an object of too serious desire and stern resolve to be personified, allegorized, and enshrined. They made no goddess of it, as the ancients did; they had no time nor inclination for such trifling; they felt that liberty was the simple birthright of every human creature; they called it so; they claimed it as such; they reverenced and held it fast as the unalienable gift of the Creator, which was not to be surrendered to power, nor sold for wages.

It was theirs, as men; without it, they did not esteem themselves men; more than any other privilege or possession, it was essential to their happiness, for it was essential to their original nature; and therefore they preferred it above wealth, and ease, and country; and, that they might

enjoy and exercise it fully, they forsook houses, and lands, and kindred, their homes, their native soil, and their fathers' graves.

They left all these; they left England, which, whatever it might have been called, was not to them a land of freedom; they launched forth on the pathless ocean, the wide, fathomless ocean, soiled not by the earth beneath, and bounded, all round and above, only by heaven; and it seemed to them like that better and sublimer freedom, which their country knew not, but of which they had the conception and image in their hearts; and, after a toilsome and painful voyage, they came to a hard and wintry coast, unfruitful and desolate, but unguarded and boundless; its calm silence interrupted not the ascent of their prayers; it had no eyes to watch, no ears to hearken, no tongues to report of them; here, again, there was an answer to their soul's desire, and they were satisfied, and gave thanks; they saw that they were free, and the desert smiled.

I am telling an old tale; but it is one which must be told when we speak of those men. It is to be added, that they transmitted their principles to their children, and that, peopled by such a race, our country was always free. So long as its inhabitants were unmolested by the mother country in the exercise of their important rights, they submitted to the form of English government; but when those rights were invaded, they spurned even the form away.

This act was the Revolution, which came of course and spontaneously, and had nothing in it of the wonderful or unforeseen. The wonder would have been if it had not occurred. It was, indeed, a happy and glorious event, but by no means unnatural; and I intend no slight to the revered actors in the Revolution when I assert that their fathers before them were as free as they-every whit as free.

The principles of the Revolution were not the suddenly acquired property of a few bosoms: they were abroad in

the land in the ages before; they had always been taught, like the truths of the Bible; they had descended from father to son, down from those primitive days, when the Pilgrim, established in his simple dwelling, and seated at his blazing fire, piled high from the forest which shaded his door, repeated to his listening children the story of his wrongs and his resistance, and bade them rejoice, though the wild winds and the wild beasts were howling without, that they had nothing to fear from great men's oppression. Here are the beginnings of the Revolution. Every settler's hearth was a school of independence; the scholars were apt, and the lessons sunk deeply; and thus it came that our country was always free; it could not be other

than free.

As deeply seated as was the principle of liberty and resistance to arbitrary power in the breasts of the Puritans, it was not more so than their piety and sense of religious obligation. They were emphatically a people whose God was the Lord. Their form of government was as strictly theocratical, if direct communication be excepted, as was that of the Jews; insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil authority among them entirely distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Whenever a few of them settled a town, they immediately gathered themselves into a church; and their elders were magistrates, and their code of laws was the Pentateuch. These were forms, it is true, but forms which faithfully indicated principles and feelings; for no people could have adopted such forms, who were not thoroughly imbued with the spirit, and bent on the practice, of religion.

God was their King; and they regarded him as truly and literally so, as if he had dwelt in a visible palace in the midst of their state. They were his devoted, resolute, humble subjects; they undertook nothing which they did not beg of him to prosper; they accomplished nothing without rendering to him the praise; they suffered nothing

without carrying their sorrows to his throne; they ate nothing which they did not implore him to bless.

Their piety was not merely external; it was sincere; it had the proof of a good tree in bearing good fruit; it produced and sustained a strict morality. Their tenacious purity of manners and speech obtained for them, in the mother country, their name of Puritans, which, though given in derision, was as honorable an appellation as was ever bestowed by man on man.

That there were hypocrites among them, is not to be doubted; but they were rare. The men who voluntarily exiled themselves to an unknown coast, and endured there every toil and hardship for conscience' sake, and that they might serve God in their own manner, were not likely to set conscience at defiance, and make the service of God a mockery; they were not likely to be, neither were they, hypocrites. I do not know that it would be arrogating too much for them to say, that, on the extended surface of the globe, there was not a single community of men to be compared with them, in the respects of deep religious impressions and an exact performance of moral duty.

F. W. P. Greenwood.

NOTE.-The Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament. The word is derived from two Greek words, tévte (pente), five, and reuxos (teuchos), book.

LVIII. LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS.

Felicia Dorothea Hemans, 1794-1835, was born in Liverpool. Her father, whose name was Browne, was an Irish merchant. She spent her childhood in Wales, began to write poetry at a very early age, and was married when about eighteen to Captain Hemans. By this marriage, she became the mother of five sons; but, owing to differences of taste and disposition, her husband left her at the end of six years; and by mutual agreement they never again lived together. Mrs. Hemans now made literature a profession, and wrote much and well. In 1826 Prof. Andrews Norton brought out an edition of her poems in America, where they be came popular, and have remained so.

Mrs. Hemans's poetry is smooth and graceful, frequently tinged with a shade of melancholy, but never despairing, cynical, or misanthropic. It never deals with the highest themes, nor rises to sublimity, but its influence is calculated to make the reader truer, nobler, and purer.

THE breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed;

And the heavy night hung dark,

The hills and waters o'er,

When a band of exiles moored their bark
On the wild New England shore.

Not as the conqueror comes,

They, the true-hearted, came;

Not with the roll of the stirring drums,
And the trumpet that sings of fame.

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They shook the depths of the desert gloom

With their hymns of lofty cheer.

Amidst the storm they sang,

And the stars heard, and the sea;

And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang

To the anthem of the free!

The ocean eagle soared

From his nest by the white wave's foam;
And the rocking pines of the forest roared,--
This was their welcome home.

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