virtue
you can dwell with honest exultation. The founders of your race are
not handed down to you, like the fathers of the Roman people, as the
sucklings of a wolf. You are not descended from a nauseous compound of
fanaticism and sensuality, whose only argument was the sword, and whose
only paradise was a brothel. No Gothic scourge of God, no Vandal pest of
nations, no fabled fugitive from the flames of Troy, no bastard Norman
tyrant, appears among the list of worthies who first landed on the
rock, which your veneration has preserved as a lasting monument of
their achievement. The great actors of the day we now solemnize were
illustrious by their intrepid valor no less than by their Christian
graces, but the clarion of conquest has not blazoned forth their names
to all the winds of heaven. Their glory has not been wafted over oceans
of blood to the remotest regions of the earth. They have not erected to
themselves colossal statues upon pedestals of human bones, to provoke
and insult the tardy hand of heavenly retribution. But theirs was "the
better fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom." Theirs was the
gentle temper of Christian kindness; the rigorous observance of
reciprocal justice; the unconquerable soul of conscious integrity.
Worldly fame has been parsimonious of her favor to the memory of those
generous companions. Their numbers were small; their stations in life
obscure; the object of their enterprise unostentatious; the theatre of
their exploits remote; how could they possibly be favorites of worldly
Fame--that common crier, whose existence is only known by the assemblage
of multitudes; that pander of wealth and greatness, so eager to haunt
the palaces of fortune, and so fastidious to the houseless dignity of
virtue; that parasite of pride, ever scornful to meekness, and ever
obsequious to insolent power; that heedless trumpeter, whose ears are
deaf to modest merit, and whose eyes are blind to bloodless, distant
excellence?

When the persecuted companions of Robinson, exiles from their native
land, anxiously sued for the privilege of removing a thousand leagues
more distant to an untried soil, a rigorous climate, and a savage
wilderness, for the sake of reconciling their sense of religious duty
with their affections for their country, few, perhaps none of them,
formed a conception of what would be, within two centuries, the result
of their undertaking. When the jealous and niggardly policy of their
Britis