ut L600
of my own, in South Sea annuities."

Thus in the forty-fourth year of his life, in deep devotion to his
Ideal, and full of glowing visions of a Fifth Empire in the West,
Berkeley sailed for Rhode Island in a "hired ship of two hundred and
fifty tons."

The _New England Courier_ of that time gives this picture of his
disembarkation at Newport: "Yesterday there arrived here Dean Berkeley,
of Londonderry. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable,
pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great
number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant
manner."

[Illustration: WHITEHALL, NEWPORT, R. I.]

So favourably was Berkeley impressed by Newport that he wrote to Lord
Percival: "I should not demur about situating our college here." And as
it turned out, Newport was the place with which Berkeley's scheme was to
be connected in history. For it was there that he lived all three years
of his stay, hopefully awaiting from England the favourable news that
never came.

In loyal remembrance of the palace of his monarchs, he named his
spacious home in the sequestered valley Whitehall. Here he began
domestic life, and became the father of a family. The neighbouring
groves and the cliffs that skirt the coast offered shade and silence and
solitude very soothing to his spirit, and one wonders not that he
wrote, under the projecting rock that still bears his name, "The Minute
Philosopher," one of his most noted works. The friends with whom he had
crossed the ocean went to stay in Boston, but no solicitations could
withdraw him from the quiet of his island home. "After my long fatigue
of business," he told Lord Percival, "this retirement is very agreeable
to me; and my wife loves a country life and books as well as to pass her
time continually and cheerfully without any other conversation than her
husband and the dead." For the wife was a mystic and a quietist.

But though Berkeley waited patiently for developments which should
denote the realisation of his hopes, he waited always in vain. From the
first he had so planned his enterprise that it was at the mercy of Sir
Robert Walpole; and at last came the crisis of the project, with which
the astute financier had never really sympathised. Early in 1730,
Walpole threw off the mask. "If you put the question to me as a
minister," he wrote Lord Percival, "I must and can assure you that the
money shall most undoubtedly be paid