fantastic of the moralizing poets of England
and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today
the inevitable outcome of her own experience in the New World. For
readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in
England by Bishop Hall and Donne, there is "The Simple Cobbler of
Agawam" written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived
only a dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are
scarcely more "American" than the satire upon German professors in
"Sartor Resartus" is "German." Like Charles Dickens's "American Notes,"
Ward's give the reaction of a born Englishman in the presence of the
sights and the talk and the personages of the transatlantic world.

Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have
lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are narratives
of struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has
always hovered in the background of the American imagination. Our boys
and girls have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian
is still found, as for three hundred years past, upon the frontier
fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like
Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have dealt with the rich material
offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with
the scribbled story of colonists. Here are comedy and tragedy, plain
narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the
inevitable alienation of the two races and the doom of the native.

The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of
Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his "best thoughts are so intangled
and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show
close naturalistic observation, touched with the abounding Elizabethan
zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these "naked slaves
of the devil" were "not so simple as some have supposed." He yearned
and labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams
and Daniel Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the
grim settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the
narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in
the storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic Fort, are as piously
relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at Drogheda, not
long after, had soldiers no more merciless than these exte