America. They left the traces of their characters deeply engraven upon our annals, and, returning to the old world, labored and suffered to confer upon their native lands the blessings of liberty. Their names are gloriously united by the inflexible consistency, with which they maintained their principles in every vicissitude of fortune, from the highest stations of power at the head of admiring nations, to imprisonment, chains, and dungeons. There is a remarkable similarity in the relations they sustained to the great military usurpers of their times. They were equally faithful to the cause of liberty and humanity.

The efforts of Lafayette, living as he did in an advanced stage of civilization, were crowned with a more prosperous issue. His sun went down in peaceful splendor. Vane's sunk beneath the horizon in blood. But if the memory of the latter can be revived in the hearts of men, his own extraordinary and sublime anticipations will be realized, and his life and death will exert a potent influence in hastening on the reign of liberty, peace, and holiness.

Every day serves to strengthen the convictions of reflecting men, that liberty can only be maintained by the diffusion of Christian virtue and truth in the hearts of the people. This was the great distinguishing principle of Vane, as a statesIn his religious acquisitions, and in his

man.

personal experience and manifestation of the spirit of piety, he transcends the examples of all other patriots known to fame. For this, he was called a fanatic, in a licentious age; but I trust and believe, that every one, into whose hands this volume may pass, will regard his Christian attainments as the richest gem in the crown of his glory.

We claim Vane and Lafayette as our own. The history of their lives is a part of our renown. In sending them to our shores, the old world made a noble benefaction to the new; and it is the duty of the new world in return to do justice to their characters, and, while we keep bright the memory of the latter, to dispel the clouds that have gathered around the name of the former, that their examples may shine with unobstructed, mingled, and quickening beams upon the whole human family.

SIR HENRY VANE.

CHAPTER I.

Introduction.

It is the peculiar privilege of the American historian, that he is enabled to trace his narrative back to its origin, without departing from the confines of recorded certainty into the regions of traditionary fable. His incidents and characters are all comprehended, if not within the memory of living witnesses, certainly within the reach of documentary evidence so recent as to leave no room to doubt its authenticity.

It has sometimes been mentioned, as an offset to this advantage, that our history is, on this account, necessarily destitute of those associations of romance, which are thought to depend for their existence upon the mists of an uncertain antiquity. But, in point of fact, there is no foundation for this remark. The fabulous legends of no nation present more interesting and extraordinary descriptions of events and characters than are collected in our annals.

The state of society throughout Christendom at and for some time after the original settlement of the American colonies; the face of the country, an interminable and unexplored wilderness; and the relations its inhabitants sustained towards the aboriginal tribes on the one side, and the conflicts of Europe on the other; all together constituted a copious source of diversified and romantic interest, which was not exhausted until the close of the Revolutionary war.

In the infancy of the colonies, the commonest incidents of every-day life were invested with all the attractions, which fortitude, courage, peril, and suffering can possibly confer. The first age of America was in an eminent degree a heroic and romantic age. The world does not afford a parallel to it. The imagination and the sensibility ever find incitements to exercise while we contemplate it; and each advancing age of our literature bears increasing testimony to the enthusiasm with which the extraordinary events and circumstances of the first generation of the Pilgrims must always be regarded.

But the primitive age of civilization in America is not to us, and never can be hereafter, an object of such intense interest as it was to its European cotemporaries. The progress of American colonization attracted, from the first, the gaze of the world. Reports were circulated far and wide of

the adventures and fortunes of the emigrants. The infinite wilderness into which they had plunged, wrapped as it was in mystery; the wild races of men and animals that roamed through it; and the magnificent scenery along its coasts and rivers, all conspired to inflame the curiosity, and bewilder the fancy of the age. Men sent their thoughts over the wide Atlantic, towards the new and strange world, just risen beyond its waters, and every object was multiplied and magnified by the ocean-haze through which it was seen.

The slightest glance at the popular literature of the period, both in England and on the Continent, will show with what power the imaginations of men had seized upon the contemplation of America.

A most striking illustration of this is found in the attraction which seemed to draw multitudes, not merely of those whom oppression and want compelled to abandon their own country, but of the most wealthy and powerful families, from all the comforts and delights of home, over a dismal ocean into a still more dismal wilderness.

Those persons, especially, whose minds had been enlarged by speculating upon the capability of mankind for a better system of government and frame of society than had been experienced in the old world; who cherished nobler designs and higher hopes, before whose vision pictures of great