on with a
young woman whom he had seduced, the wife of a cooper, and the captain
was forced to make public confession, which he did with great unction
and in a manner highly dramatic. "He came in his worst clothes (being
accustomed to take great pride in his bravery and neatness), without a
band, in a foul linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and standing
upon a form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance of tears, lay
open his wicked course." There is a lurking humor in the grave
Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings. Winthrop's own
personality comes out well in his Journal. He was a born leader of
men, a _conditor imperii_, just, moderate, patient, wise; and his
narrative gives, upon the whole, a favorable impression of the general
prudence and fair-mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their
dealings with one another, with the Indians, and with the neighboring
plantations.

Considering our forefathers' errand and calling into this wilderness,
it is not strange that their chief literary staples were sermons and
tracts in controversial theology. Multitudes of these were written and
published by the divines of the first generation, such as John Cotton,
Thomas Shepard, John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the
founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that "when he was doing
his Master's business he would put a king into his pocket." Nor were
their successors in the second or the third generation any less
industrious and prolific. They rest from their labors and their works
do follow them. Their sermons and theological treatises are not
literature: they are for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but
they exhibit great learning, logical acuteness, and an earnestness
which sometimes rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New England,
and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of the time. The
serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to
religion; the other world was all their art. The daily secular events
of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were
important enough to find record in print only in so far as they
manifested God's dealings with his people. So much was the sermon
depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom
of serious-minded laymen to take down the words of the discourse in
their note-books. Franklin, in his _Autobiography_, describes this as
the constant habit of his grandfa