own as Caledonia
Bay, and the harbor as Porto Escoces, but the Isla de Pinas as well as a
river of the same name do not appear on maps of the region. The curious
may find references to the island in the printed accounts of the
unfortunate Darien colony.

The Isle of Pines could thus be found on the map as an actual island in
the West Indies; but the "Isle of Pines" of our tract existed only
in the imagination of the writer. The mere fact of its having been
printed--but not published--in Cambridge, Massachusetts, does not
entitle it to be classed even indirectly as Americana, any more than
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or [29]Thomas a Kempis could be so marked on
the strength of their having a Massachusetts imprint Curiosities of the
American press they may be, but they serve only as crude measures of the
existing taste for literature since become recognized as classic.

The dignified Calendar of State Papers in the Public Record Office,
London, gravely indexes a casual reference to the tract under West
Indies, and the impression that the author wrote of the Cuban island
probably accounts for the different editions in the John Carter Brown
Library, as well as for the price obtained for the White Kennett copy.
No possible reason can be found, however, for regarding the "Isle of
Pines" in any of its forms as Americana.

THE AUTHOR

Thus far I have been concerned with externals, and before turning to the
contents of the tract itself in an endeavor to explain the extraordinary
popularity it enjoyed, something must be said of the author--Henry
Neville. Like most of the characters engaged in the politics of England
in the middle of the seventeenth century, he has suffered at the hands
of his biographer, Anthony a Wood,{1} merely because he belonged to
the opposite party--the crudest possible measure of merit For the odium
politicum and the odium theologicum are twin agents of detraction, and
the writing of history would be dull indeed were it not for the joy of
digging out an approximation to the truth from opposing opinions. Where
the material is so scanty it will be safer [30]to summarize what is
known, without attempting to pass finally upon Neville's position among
his contemporaries.

1 Athenae Oxoniemses (Bliss), iv. 413.

The second son of Sir Henry Neville, and grandson of Sir Henry Neville
(1564?-1615), courtier and diplomatist under Elizabeth and James I,
Henry Neville was born in Billing-bear, Berksh