ot last long. Bradford and other leaders of the plantations
"agreed by mutual consent" to "suppress Morton and his consorts." "In a
friendly and neighborly way" they admonished him. "Insolently he
persisted." "Upon which they saw there was no way but to take him by
force." "So they mutually resolved to proceed," and sent Captain
Standish to summon him to yield. But, says Bradford, Morton and some of
his crew came out, not to yield, but to shoot; all of them rather
drunk; Morton himself, with a carbine almost half filled with powder
and shot, had thought to have shot Captain Standish, "_but he stepped
to him and put by his piece and took him_."

It is not too fanciful to say that with those stern words of Governor
Bradford the English Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a lawless
liberty which has been dreamed and dreamed out so many times in the
history of the world was over, for many a day. It was only a hundred
years earlier that Rabelais had written over the doors of his ideal
abbey, the motto "Do what thou wilt." It is true that Rabelais proposed
to admit to his Abbey of Theleme only such men and women as were
virtuously inclined. We do not know how many persons would have been
able and willing to go into residence there. At any rate, two hundred
years went by in New England after the fall of Morton before any
notable spirit dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance ideal. At
last, in Emerson's doctrine that all things are lawful because Nature
is good and human nature is divine, we have a curious parallel to the
doctrine of Rabelais. It was the old romance of human will under a new
form and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the hard facts of human
nature reasserted themselves and put this romantic transcendentalism
by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put by that heavily loaded
fowling-piece of the drunken Morton.

But men believed in miracles in the first century of colonization, and
they will continue at intervals to believe in them until human nature
is no more. The marvellous happenings recorded in Cotton Mather's
_Magnalia_ no longer excite us to any "suspension of disbelief." We
doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh romantic enthusiasm of a
settler like Crevecoeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does the
romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning the Mississippi and the
Choctaws, or the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over their dream of a
"panti-Socratic" community in the unk