Chapter II (4)

Every great advocate must, at times, especially in the trial of capital cases, be held popularly responsible for the acquittal of men whom the public has prejudged to be guilty. This unreasoning, impulsive, and irresponsible public never stops to inform itself; never discriminates between legal acumen and pettifogging trickery, between doing one's full duty to his client and interposing or misrepresenting his own personal opinions; and never remembers that the functions of law and the practice of law are to prevent and to punish crime, to ascertain the truth, and to determine and enforce justice,--that trial by jury, and the other means and methods through which justice is administered, are founded in the largest wisdom, philanthropy, and experience,--that they cannot work perfectly, because human nature is imperfect, but they constitute the best practical system for the application of abstract principles of right to the complicated affairs of life which the world has yet seen, and which steadily improves as our race improves,--and that every great lawyer is aiding in elucidating truth and in administering justice, when doing his duty to his client under this system. Our trial by jury has its imperfections; but, laying aside its demonstrated value and necessity in great struggles for freedom, before and since the time of Erskine, no better scheme can be devised to do its great and indispensable work. The very things which seem to an uninformed man like rejection or confusion of truth are a part of the sifting by which it is to be reached. The admission or rejection of evidence under sound rules of law, the presenting of the whole case of each party and of the best argument which can be made upon it by his counsel, the charge of the judge and the verdict of the jury,--all are necessary parts of the process of reaching truth and justice. Counsel themselves cannot know a whole case until tried to its end; their clients have a right to their best services, within the limits of personal honor; and lawyers are derelict in duty, not only to their clients, but to justice itself, if they do not present their cases to the best of their ability, when they are to be followed by opposing counsel, by the judge, and by the jury. The popular judgment is not only capricious,--it not only assumes that legal precedents, founded in justice for the protection of the honest, are petty technicalities or tricks through which the dishonest escape,--it is not only formed out of the court-room, with no opportunity to see witnesses and hear testimony, often very different in reality from what they seem in print,--but it visits upon counsel its ignorant prejudices against the theory and practice of the law itself, and forgets that lawyers cannot present to the jury a particle of evidence except with the sanction of the court under sound rules of law, and that the law is to be laid down by the court alone.

A man thoroughly in earnest in any direction is more or less a partisan. Histories are commonly uninfluential or worthless, unless written with views so earnest and decided as to show bias. As the greater interests of truth are best subserved by those whose zeal is commensurate to their scope of mind, so it is a part of the scheme of jury-trials, that, within the limits we have named, counsel shall throw their whole force into their cases, that thus they may be presented fully in all lights, and the right results more surely reached. The scheme of jury-trials itself thus providing for a lawyer's standing in the place of his client and deriving from him his partisan opinions, and for urging his case in its full force within the limits of sound rules of law, it almost invariably follows, that, the greater the talent and zeal of the advocate, and the more he believes in the views of his client, the more liable he is to be charged with overstating or misstating testimony. Mr. Choate never conceived that his duty to his client should carry him up to the line of self-surrender drawn by Lord Brougham; but, recognizing his client's full and just claims upon him, entering into his opinions and nature with the sympathetic and dramatic realization we have described, he could not faithfully perform the prescribed and admitted duty of the advocate,--necessarily, with him, involving his throwing the whole force of his physical and intellectual vitality into every case he tried,--without being a vehement partisan, or without being sometimes charged with misstating evidence or going too far for his client. Occasionally this may have been true; but we see the explanation in the very quality of his genius and temperament, and not in conscious or intentional wrong-doing.

His ability and method in his strictly legal arguments to courts of law are substantially indicated in what we have already said. His manner, however, was here calm, his general views of his subject large and philosophic, his legal learning full, his reasoning clear, strong, and consequential, his discrimination quick and sure, and his detection of a logical fallacy unerring, his style, though sometimes fairly open to the charge of redundancy, graceful and transparent in its exhibition of his argument, and his mind always at home, and in its easiest and most natural exercise, when anything in his case rose into connection with great principles.

While exhibiting in his jury-trials, as we have shown, this double process of absolute identification and of perfect supervision and self-control,--of instantaneous imaginative dips into his work, and of as instantaneous withdrawal from it,--of purposely and yet completely throwing himself in one sentence into the realization of an emotion, thus perfectly conveying his meaning while living the thought, and yet coming out of it to see quicker than any one that it might be made absurd by displacement,--he always had, as it were, an air-drawn, circle of larger thought and superintending relation far around the immediate question into which he passed so dramatically. Within this outer circle, attached and related to it by everything in the subject-matter of real poetic or philosophic importance, was his case, creatively woven and spread in artistic light and perspective; and between the two (if we do not press our illustration beyond clear limits) was a heat-lightning-like play of mind, showing itself, at one moment, in unexpected flashes of poetic analogy, at another in Puck-like mischief, and again in imaginative irony or humor.

As he recovered himself from abandonment to some part of his case or argument to guide and mould the whole, so, going into his library, he could, as completely, for minutes or for hours, banish and forget his anxieties and dramatic excitements, and pass into the cooling air and loftier and purer stimulations of the great minds of other times and countries and of the great questions that overhang us all. His mind, capacious, informed, wise, doubting, "looking before and after," here found its highest pleasures, and its little, but most loved repose. "The more a man does, the more he can do"; and, notwithstanding his immense practice, and that by physical and intellectual constitution he couldn't _half_ do anything, he never allowed a day of his life to pass, without reading some, if ever so little, Greek, and it was a surprise to those who knew him well to find that he kept up with everything important in modern literature. Rising and going to bed early, taking early morning exercise, having a strong constitution, though he was subject to sudden but quickly overcome nervous and bilious illness, wasting no time, caring nothing for the coarser social enjoyments, leading, out of court, a self-withdrawn and solitary life, though playful, genial, and stimulating in social intercourse, with a memory as tenacious and ready as his apprehension was quick, with high powers of detecting, mastering, arranging, and fusing his acquisitions, and of penetrating to the centre of historical characters and events,--it is not strange, though he may not have been critically exact and nice in questions of quantity and college exercises, that his scholarship was large and available in all its higher aims and uses.

It will naturally be asked, how such qualities as we have described manifested themselves in character, and in political and other fields of thought and exertion. Fair abilities, zeal, industry, a sanguine temperament, and some special bent or fitness for the profession of the law, will make a good and successful lawyer. Such a man's mind will be entirely in and limited by the immediate case in hand, and virtually his intellectual life will be recorded in his cases. But with Mr. Choate, the dramatic genius and large scope and vision which made him superior to other great advocates at the same time prevented his overestimating the value of his work in kind or degree, showed him how ephemeral are the actual triumphs and how small the real value of nearly all the questions he thus vitalized into artistic reality, when compared with the great outlying truths and principles to which he allied them. Feeling this all through his cases, at the same time that he was moulding them and giving them dramatic vitality, they took their true position from natural reaction and rebound, with all the more sharpness of contrast, when he came out of them. With such a nature, it could be assumed _a priori_ as a psychological certainty, at any rate it was the fact with him, that a certain unreality was at times thrown over life and its objects, that its projects and ambitions seemed games and mockeries, and "this brave o'erhanging firmament a pestilent congregation of vapors," and that grave doubts and fears on the great questions of existence were ever on the horizon of his mind. This gave perpetual play to his irony, and made it a necessity and a relief of mind. Except when in earnest in some larger matter, or closely occupied in accomplishing some smaller necessary purpose or duty, his imagination loved the tricksy play of exhibiting the petty side of life in contrast to its realities, just as in his cases it found its exercise in lifting them up to relations with what is poetic and permanent. But, though irony was thus the natural language of his mind, it did not pass beyond the limits of the mischievous and kindly, because there was nothing scoffing or bitter in his nature. It was fresh and natural, never studied for effect, and gave his conversation the charm of constant novelty and surprises. He loved to condense the results of thought and study into humorous or grotesque overstatements, which, while they amused his hearers, conveyed his exact meaning to every one who followed the mercurial movement of his mind. It will readily be seen how a person with neither insight into his nature nor apprehension of his meaning should, without intending it, misinterpret his life and caricature his opinions,--blundering only the more deeply when trying to be literally exact in reporting conversations or portraying character.

It has been shrewdly said, that, "when the Lord wants anything done in this world, he makes a man a little wrong-headed in the right direction." With this goes the disposition to overestimate the importance of one's work and to push principles and theories towards extremes. The saying is true of some individuals at or before certain crises in affairs; it is not true of the great inevitable historical movements, any more than the history of revolutions is the history of nations. Halifax is called a trimmer. William Wilberforce was a reformer. Each did a great work. But it would be simply absurd, except in the estimation of the moral purist, to call Wilberforce as great a man or as great an historical and influential person as Halifax. Halifax saw and acted in the clear light and large relations in which the great historian of our own times wrote the history of the Stuarts. Wilberforce was a purer man, who acted more conscientiously and persistently within his smaller range of life and thought. It would have been inconsistent with Mr. Choate's nature for him to have been "wrong-headed" in any direction. Such largeness of view, such dramatic and interpretative imagination, such volatile play of thought and fancy, and such perception of the pettiness and hollowness of nearly all the aims and ambitions of daily life we cannot expect to find coexisting with the coarser "blood-sympathies," the direct passion, and the dogged and tenacious hold of temporary and smaller objects and issues, which distinguish the American politician, or with the narrowness of view, the zeal, and the moral persistency which characterize the practical reformer. There was, therefore, in his nature a certain want of the sturdier, harder, and more robust elements of character, which, though commonly manifesting themselves in connection with self-assertion and partisan zeal, are indispensable to the man who, in any large and political way, would take hold of practical circumstances and work a purpose out of them. We admire him for what he was. We do not condemn him for the absence of qualities not allied to such delicacy and breadth of nature. It is simply just to state the fact.

He had too little political ambition to seek his own advancement. He never could have been a strictly party man. His interest in our politics was a patriotic interest in the country. While he recognized the necessity of two great parties, he despised the arts and intrigues of the politician. His modesty, sensibility, large views, and want of political ambition and partisan spirit prevented interest, as they would have precluded success in party management. Had he spent many years instead of a few in the national Senate, he never could have been a leader in its great party struggles. He had not the hardier personal and constitutional qualities of mind and character which lead and control deliberative bodies in great crises. He would not have had that statesmanlike prescience which in the case of Lord Chatham and others seems separable from great general scope of thought, and which one is tempted to call a faculty for government. But he must have been influential; for, besides being the most eloquent man in the Senate, his speeches would have been distinguished for amplitude and judgment in design, and for tact and persuasiveness in enforcement. They might not have had immediate and commanding effect, but they would have had permanent value. His speech upon the Ashburton Treaty indicates the powers he would have shown, with a longer training in the Senate. More than ten years had passed between that speech and his two speeches in the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, upon Representation and the Judiciary, and in that time a great maturing and solidifying work had been going on in his mind. Indeed, it was one sure test of his genius, that his intellect plainly grew to the day of his death. We would point to those two speeches as giving some adequate expression of his ability to treat large subjects simply, profoundly, artistically, and convincingly. Many of his earlier and some of his later speeches and addresses, though large in conception and stamped with unmistakable genius, want solid body of thought, and are, so to speak, too fluid in style. This obviously springs from the qualities of mind and from the circumstances we have indicated. In court, the necessities of his case and the determination and shaping of all his argument and persuasion to convincing twelve men, or a court only, on questions requiring prompt decision, kept his style free from everything foreign to his purpose. But, released from these restraints, and called upon for a treatment more general and comprehensive than acute and discriminating, his style often became inflamed and decorated with sensibility and fancy. His mind, moreover, was overtasked in his profession. His unremitting mental labor in the preparation and trial of so many cases was immense and exhausting. It shortened his life. That his genius might have that free and joyous exercise necessary to its full use and exhibition in literary or political directions, an abandonment of a great part of his professional duties was indispensable. This was to him neither possible nor desirable. The mental heat and pressure, therefore, under which he wrote his speeches and addresses, and the necessity for the exercise of different methods of thought and treatment from those called into play at the bar, explain why (with a few noble exceptions) they do not give a fair or full exhibition of his genius and accomplishments. But in them his judgment never lost its anchorage. Unlike Burke, who was the god of his political idolatry, his sensibility never overmastered his reasoning. Through a style sometimes Eastern in flush and fervor, and again tropical in heat and luxuriance, were always seen the adjusting and attempering habit of thought and argument and the even balance of his mind.

We have said that his interest in politics was a patriotic interest in the nation. He knew her history and her triumphs and reverses on land and sea by heart. Though limited by no narrow love of country, he felt from sentiment and imagination that attachment to every symbol of patriotism and national power which makes the sailor suffer death with joy when he sees his country's flag floating in the smoke of victory. "The radiant ensign of the Republic" was to him the living embodiment of her honor and her power. He had for it the pride and passion of the boy, with the prophetic hopes of the patriot. Men of genius are ever revivifying the commonplace expressions and visible signs of popular enthusiasm with the poetic and historic realities which gave them birth. He felt the glow and impulse of the great sentiments of race and nationality in all their natural simplicity and poetic force. It is not now the time to discuss Mr. Choate's political preferences and opinions. No one who knew him well can hesitate to pronounce his motives pure and patriotic. We could not come to his conclusions on the policy and duty of our people at the last Presidential election. Our duties to the Union forced us to regard as paramount what he regarded as subsidiary. Our fear for the Union sprang from other sources than his. But we believe he acted from the highest convictions of duty, and he certainly exposed himself with unflinching courage to obloquy and misinterpretation when silence would have been easy and safe.

In what we have said of him as a lawyer we are sure that in every essential respect we have not overstated or misstated his powers and characteristics as they were known and conceded by lawyers and judges in Massachusetts. We have confined ourselves mainly to his jury-trials, because into them he threw the whole force and vitality of his nature, and because we could thus more completely indicate the variety of his accomplishments and the essential characteristics of his genius and individuality. A knowledge of them is indispensable to a just estimate of the man, and it must die with him and his hearers, excepting only as it may be preserved by contemporaneous written criticism and judgment, and by indeterminate and shadowy tradition.

The labors of so great a lawyer are as much more useful as they are less conspicuous than those of any prominent politician or legislator, unless he be one of the very few who have high constructive or creative ability. There is little risk of overestimating the value of a life devoted to mastering that complex system of jurisprudence, the old, ever-expanding, and ever-improving common law which is interwoven with our whole fabric of government, property, and personal rights, and to applying it profoundly through trial by jury and before courts of law, not merely that justice may be obtained for clients, but that decisions shall be made determining the rights and duties of men for generations to come. And when such a life is not only full of immense work and achievement, but is penetrated and informed with genius, sensibility, and loving-kindness, it passes sweetly and untraceably, but influentially and immortally, into the life of the nation.

THE REGICIDE COLONELS IN NEW ENGLAND.

Before the restoration of Charles the Second, in 1660, to the throne of his ancestors, he had issued a "Declaration," promising to all persons but such as should be excepted by Parliament a pardon of offences committed during the late disorderly times. In the Parliamentary Act of Indemnity which followed, such as had been directly concerned in the death of the late King were excepted from mercy. Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe were members of the High Court of Justice which convicted and sentenced him. It was known that they had fled from England; and one Captain Breedon, lately returned from Boston, reported that he had seen them there. The Ministry sent an order to Endicott, the Governor of Massachusetts, for their apprehension and transportation to England.

The friendly welcome which had in fact been extended to the distinguished fugitives cannot be confidently interpreted as an indication of favorable judgment of the act by which their lives were now endangered. No one of the New-England Colonies had formally expressed approval of the execution of King Charles the First, nor is there any other evidence of its having been generally regarded by them with favor. It is likely that in New England, as in the parent country, the opinions of patriotic men were divided in respect to the character of that measure. In New England, remote as it was from the scene of those crimes which had provoked so extreme a proceeding, it may be presumed that there was greater difficulty in admitting the force of the reasons, by which it was vindicated. And the sympathy of New England would be more likely to be with Vane, who condemned it, than with Cromwell. But the strangers, however one act of theirs might be regarded, had been eminent among those who had fought for the rights of Englishmen, and they brought introductions from men venerated and beloved by the people among whom a refuge was sought.

Edward Whalley, a younger son of a good family, first cousin of the Protector Oliver, and of John Hampden, distinguished himself at the Battle of Naseby as an officer of cavalry, and was presently promoted by Parliament to the command of a regiment. He commanded at the storm of Banbury, and at the first capture of Worcester. He was intrusted with the custody of the King's person at Hampton Court; he sat in the High Court of Justice at the trial of Charles, and was one of the signers of the death-warrant. After the Battle of Dunbar, at which he again won renown, Cromwell left him in Scotland in command of four regiments of horse. He was one of the Major-Generals among whom the kingdom was parcelled out by one of the Protector's last arrangements, and as such governed the Counties of Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Warwick, and Leicester. He sat as a member for Nottinghamshire in Cromwell's Second and Third Parliaments, and was called up to "the other House" when that body was constituted.

William Goffe, son of a Puritan clergyman in Sussex, was a member of Parliament, and a colonel of infantry soon after the breaking out of the Civil War. He married a daughter of Whalley. Like his father-in-law, he was a member of the High Court of Justice for the King's trial, a signer of the warrant for his execution, a member of the Protector's Third and Fourth Parliaments, and then a member of "the other House." He commanded Cromwell's regiment at the Battle of Dunbar, and rendered service particularly acceptable to him in the second expurgation of Parliament. As one of the ten Major-Generals, he held the government of Hampshire, Berkshire, and Sussex.

When Whalley and Goffe, upon the King's return, left England to escape what they apprehended might prove the fate of regicides, the policy of the Court in respect to persons circumstanced as they were had not been promulgated. Arriving in Boston, in July, and having been courteously welcomed by the Governor, they proceeded the same day to Cambridge, which place for the present they made their home. For several months they appeared there freely in public. They attended the public religious meetings, and others held at private houses, at which latter they prayed, and _prophesied_, or preached. They visited some of the principal towns in the neighborhood, were often in Boston, and were received, wherever they went, with distinguished attention.

At the end of four months, intelligence came to Massachusetts of the Act of Indemnity, and that Whalley and Goffe were among those excepted from it, and marked for vengeance. Three months longer they lived at Cambridge unmolested; but in the mean while affairs had been growing critical between Massachusetts and the mother country, and, though some members of the General Court assured them of protection, others thought it more prudent that they should have a hint to provide for their safety in some way which would not imply an affront to the royal government on the part of the Colony. The Governor called a Court of Assistants, in February, and without secrecy asked their advice respecting his obligation to secure the refugees. The Court refused to recommend that measure, and four days more passed, at the end of which time--whether induced by the persuasion of others, or by their own conviction of the impropriety of involving their generous hosts in further embarrassment, or simply because they had been awaiting till then the completion of arrangements for their reception at New Haven--they set off for that place.

A journey of nine days brought them to the hospitable house of the Reverend Mr. Davenport, where again they moved freely in the society of the ministers and the magistrates. But they had scarcely been at New Haven three weeks, when tidings came thither of the reception at Boston of a proclamation issued by the King for their arrest. To release their host from responsibility, they went to Milford, (as if on their way to New Netherland,) and there showed themselves in public; but returned secretly the same night to New Haven, and were concealed in Davenport's house. This was towards the last of March.

They had been so situated a month, when their friends had information from Boston that the search for them was to be undertaken in earnest. Further accounts of their having been seen in that place had reached England, and the King had sent a peremptory order to the Colonial governments for their apprehension. Endicott, to whom it was transmitted, could do no less than appear to interest himself to execute it; and this he might do with the less reluctance, because, under the circumstances, there was small likelihood that his exertions would be effectual. Two young English merchants, Thomas Kellond and Thomas Kirk, received from him a commission to prosecute the search in Massachusetts, and were also furnished with letters of recommendation to the Governors of the other Colonies. That they were zealous Royalists, direct from England, would be some evidence to the home government that the quest would be pursued in good faith. That they were foreigners, unacquainted with the roads and with the habits of the country, and betraying themselves by their deportment wherever they should go in New England, would afford comfortable assurance to the Governor that they would pursue their quest in vain.

From Boston, the pursuivants, early in May, went to Hartford, where they were informed by Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut, that "the Colonels," as they were called, had passed thence immediately before, on their way to New Haven. Thither the messengers proceeded, stopping on the way at Guilford, the residence of Deputy-Governor Leete. Since the recent death of Governor Newman, Leete had been Chief Magistrate of the Colony of New Haven, which was now, and for a few years later, distinct from Connecticut.

The Deputy-Governor received them in the presence of several other persons. He looked over their papers, and then "began to read them audibly; whereupon we told him," say the messengers, "it was convenient to be more private in such concernments as that was." They desired to be furnished "with horses, &c.," for their further journey, "which was prepared with some delays." They were accosted, on coming out, by a person who told them that the Colonels were secreted at Mr. Davenport's, "and that, without all question, Deputy Leete knew as much"; and that "in the head of a company in the field a-training," it had lately been "openly spoken by them, that, if they had but two hundred friends that would stand by them, they would not care for Old or New England."

The messengers returned to Leete, and made an application for "aid and a power to search and apprehend" the fugitives. "He refused to give any power to apprehend them, nor order any other, and said he could do nothing until he had spoken with one Mr. Gilbert and the rest of his magistrates." New Haven, the seat of government of the Colony, was twenty miles distant from Guilford. It was now Saturday afternoon, and for a New-England Governor to break the Sabbath by setting off on a journey, or by procuring horses for any other traveller, was impossible. An Indian was observed to have left Guilford while the parley was going on, and was supposed to have gone on an errand to New Haven.

Monday morning the messengers proceeded thither. "To our certain knowledge," they write, "one John Meigs was sent a-horseback before us, and by his speedy and unexpected going so early before day was to give them an information, and the rather because by the delays was used, it was break of day before we got to horse; so he got there before us. Upon our suspicion, we required the Deputy that the said John Meigs might be examined what his business was, that might occasion so early going; to which the Deputy answered, that he did not know any such thing, and refused to examine him." Leete was in no haste to make his own journey to the capital. It was for the messengers to judge whether they would use such despatch as to give an alarm there some time before any magistrate was present, to be invoked for aid. He arrived, they write, "within two hours, or thereabouts, after us and came to us to the Court chamber, where we again acquainted him with the information we had received, and that we had cause to believe they [the fugitives] were concealed in New Haven, and thereupon we required his assistance and aid for their apprehension; to which he answered, that he did not believe they were; whereupon we desired him to empower us, or order others for it; to which he gave us this answer, the he could not, or would not, make us magistrates... We set before him the danger of that delay and their inevitable escape, and how much the honor and service of his Majesty was despised and trampled on by him, and that we supposed by his unwillingness to assist in the apprehension he was willing they should escape. After which he left us, and went to several of the magistrates, and were together five or six hours in consultation, and upon breaking up of their council they told us they would not nor could not to anything until they had called a General Court of the freemen."

The messengers labored with great earnestness to shake this determination, but all in vain. For precedents they appealed to the promptness of the Governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut, "who, upon the recite of his Majesty's pleasure and order concerning the said persons, stood not upon such niceties and formalities." They represented "how much the honor and justice of his Majesty was concerned, and how ill his Sacred Majesty would resent such horrid and detestable concealments and abettings of such traitors and regicides as they were, and asked him whether he would honor and obey the King or no in this affair, and set before him the danger which by law is incurred by any one that conceals or abets traitors; to which the Deputy Leete answered, 'We honor his Majesty, but we have tender consciences'; to which we replied, that we believed that he knew where they were, and only pretended tenderness of conscience for a refusal.... We told them that for their respect to two traitors they would do themselves injury, and possibly ruin themselves and the whole Colony of New Haven."

"Finding them obstinate and pertinacious in their contempt of his Majesty," the messengers, probably misled by some false information, took the road to New Netherland, the next day, in further prosecution of their business. The Dutch Governor at that place promised them, that, if the Colonels appeared within his jurisdiction, he would give notice to Endicott, and take measures to prevent their escape by sea. Thereupon Kellond and Kirk returned by water to Boston, where they made oath before the magistrates to a report of their proceedings.

The fugitives had received timely notice of the chase. A week before Kellond and Kirk left Boston, they removed from Mr. Davenport's house to that of William Jones, son-in-law of Governor Eaton, and afterwards Deputy-Governor of Connecticut. On the day when the messengers were debating with Governor Leete at Guilford, Whalley and Goffe were conducted to a mill, at a short distance from New Haven, where they were hidden two days and nights. Thence they were led to a spot called Hatchet Harbor, about as much farther in a northwesterly direction, where they lay two nights more. Meantime, for fear of the effect of the large rewards which the messengers had offered for their capture, a more secure hiding-place had been provided for them in a hollow on the east side of West Rock, five miles from the town. In this retreat they remained four weeks, being supplied with food from a lonely farm-house in the neighborhood, to which they also sometimes withdrew in stormy weather. They caused the Deputy-Governor to be informed of their hiding-place; and on hearing that Mr. Davenport was in danger from a suspicion of harboring them, they left it, and for a week or two showed themselves at different times at New Haven and elsewhere. After two months more of concealment in their retreat on the side of West Bock, they betook themselves, just after the middle of August, to the house of one Tomkins, in or near Milford. There they remained in complete secrecy for two years, after which time they indulged themselves in more freedom, and even conducted the devotions of a few neighbors assembled in their chamber.

But the arrival at Boston of Commissioners from the King with extraordinary powers was now expected, and it was likely that they would be charged to institute a new search, which might endanger the fugitives, and would certainly be embarrassing to their protectors. Just at this time a feud in the churches of Hartford and Wethersfield had led to an emigration to a spot of fertile meadow forty miles farther up the river. Mr. Russell, hitherto minister of Wethersfield, accompanied the new settlers as their pastor. The General Court gave their town the name of Hadley. In this remotest northwestern frontier of New England a refuge was prepared for the fugitives. On hearing of the arrival of the Commissioners at Boston, they withdrew to their cave; but some Indians in hunting observed that it had been occupied, and its secrecy could no longer be counted on. They consequently directed their steps towards Hadley, travelling only by night, and there, in the month of October, 1664, were received into the house of Mr. Russell.

There--except for a remarkable momentary appearance of one of them, and except for the visits of a few confidential friends--they remained lost forever to the view of men. Presents were made to them by leading persons among the colonists, and they received remittances from friends in England. Governor Hutchinson, when he wrote his History, had in his hands the Diary of Goffe, begun at the time of their leaving London, and continued for six or seven years. They were for a time encouraged by a belief, founded on their interpretation of the Apocalypse, that the execution of their comrades was "the slaying of the witnesses," and that their own triumph was speedily to follow. Letters passed between Goffe and his wife, purporting to be between a son and mother, and signed respectively with the names of Walter and Frances Goldsmith. Four of these letters survive; tender, magnanimous, and devout, they are scarcely to be read without tears.

In the tenth year of his abode at Hadley Whalley had become extremely infirm in mind and body, and he probably did not outlive that year. Mr. Russell's house was standing till within a little more than half a century ago. At its demolition, the removal of a slab in the cellar discovered human remains of a large size. They are believed to have belonged to the stout frame which swept through Prince Rupert's lines at Naseby. Goffe survived his father-in-law nearly five years, at least; how much longer, is not known. Once he was seen abroad, after his retirement to Mr. Russell's house. The dreadful war, to which the Indian King Philip bequeathed his long execrated name, was raging with its worst terrors in the autumn of 1675. On the first day of September, the people of Hadley kept a fast, to implore the Divine protection in their distress. While they were engaged in their worship, a sentry's shot gave notice that the stealthy savages were upon them. Hutchinson, in his History, relates what follows, as he had received it from the family of Governor Leverett, who was one of the few visitors of Goffe in his retreat. "The people were in the utmost confusion. Suddenly a grave, elderly person appeared in the midst of them. In his mien and dress he differed from the rest of the people. He not only encouraged them to defend themselves, but put himself at their head, rallied, instructed, and led them on to encounter the enemy, who by this means were repulsed. As suddenly the deliverer of Hadley disappeared. The people were left in consternation, utterly unable to account for this strange phenomenon. It is not probable that they were ever able to explain it."

In the first years of the retirement of the Colonels at Hadley, they enjoyed the society of a former friend, who did not feel obliged to use the same strict precautions against discovery. John Dixwell, like themselves, was a colonel in the Parliamentary service, a member of the High Court of Justice, and a signer of the death-warrant of the King. Nothing is known of his proceedings after the restoration of the monarchy, till he came to Hadley, three or four months later than Whalley and Goffe. After a residence of some years in their neighborhood, he removed to New Haven, where, bearing the name of James Davids, and affecting no particular privacy, he lived to old age. The home-government never traced him to America; and though, among his acquaintance, it was understood that he had a secret to keep, there was no disposition to penetrate it. He married twice at New Haven, and by his second nuptials established a family, one branch of which survives. In testamentary documents, as well as in communications, while he lived, to his minister and others, he frankly made known his character and history. He died just too early to hear the tidings, which would have renewed his strength like the eagle's, of the expulsion of the House of Stuart. A fit monument directs the traveller to the place of his burial, in the square bounded on one side by the halls of Yale College.

TO THE CAT-BIRD.

You, who would with wanton art
Counterfeit another's part,
And with noisy utterance claim
Right to an ignoble name,--
Inharmonious!--why must you,
To a better self untrue,
Gifted with the charm of song,
Do the generous gift such wrong?

Delicate and downy throat,
Shaped for pure, melodious note,--
Silvery wing of softest gray,--
Bright eyes glancing every way,--
Graceful outline,--motion free:
Types of perfect harmony!

Ah! you much mistake your duty,
Mating discord thus with beauty,--
'Mid these heavenly sunset gleams,
Vexing the smooth air with screams,--
Burdening the dainty breeze
With insane discordancies.

I have heard you tell a tale
Tender as the nightingale,
Sweeter than the early thrush
Pipes at day-dawn from the bush.
Wake once more the liquid strain
That you poured, like music-rain,
When, last night, in the sweet weather,
You and I were out together.
Unto whom two notes are given,
One of earth, and one of heaven,
Were it not a shameful tale
That the earth-note should prevail?

For the sake of those who love us,
For the sake of God above us,
Each and all should do their best
To make music for the rest.
So will I no more reprove,
Though the chiding be in love:
Uttering harsh rebuke to you,
That were inharmonious, too.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.