to the relief of Lucknow, is a pure and beautiful fiction. As the naturalist, to examine the silk-worm, is obliged to mutilate its delicate and glossy residence, so the historian will not be deterred from tearing away, with the hard steel-pen, the delicate web with which imagination has frequently surrounded the beginnings of a great nation, like Rome. The accomplished Bancroft speaks of John Rolfe-" a young Englishman, an amiable enthusiast, who had emigrated to the forests of Virginia, daily, hourly, and, as it were, in his very sleep"-hearing a voice, crying in his ears, that he should strive to make Pocahontas, a young Indian maiden, a Christian, and, constrained by the love of Christ, uniting her, to him, by the holy bonds of matrimony. But the prosaic pages of the London Company's transactions, and the old folios of Purchas, show that Rolfe was a married man, some years before this union, and that after his death, there was a white widow and her children, beside the son he had by Pocahontas. The same historian assures us, that the settlers of Maryland were "most of them Roman Catholic gentlemen," while Lord Baltimore, in a letter to the Earl of Strafford, states that the colonists were chiefly poor labouring men, and there is reason to believe that they were mostly Protestants. The temptation to theorize, and employ rhetorical embellishment, has, as far as possible, been overcome, and naked facts have been submitted to the reader. In the preparation of this volume upon the seed-time of American civilization, the method of the old Roman Vegetius, in his treatise on the "Military Art," has been pursued: "Nihil enim mihi auctoritatis assumo, sed quæ dispersa sunt, velut in ordinem epitomata conscribo." DUBLIN, IRELAND. |