d to find the new poem built on a history which novelists
and story-tellers have been nibbling at these twenty years, and which
seems to be a peculiarly relishable bit of _news_ on an old subject, if
we may judge by the way in which literary epicures have snatched it up
piecemeal. In the first place, Sir Walter Scott, who read every thing,
got hold of a "North American publication,"[20] from which he learned;
with surprise, that Whalley the regicide, "who was never heard of after
the Restoration," fled to Massachusetts, and there lived concealed, and
died, and was laid in an obscure grave, which had lately been
ascertained. Giving Mr. Cooper due credit for a prior use of the story,
he made it over, in his own inimitable way, and puts it into the mouth
of Major Bridgenorth, relating his adventures in America. Southey seems
next to have got wind of it, reviewing "Holmes' American Annals,"[21] in
the _Quarterly_, when he confesses he first thought of King Philip's war
as the subject for an epic--a thought which afterwards became a flame,
and determined him to make Goffe (another regicide) the hero of his
poem. A few details of the story got out of romance and gossip into
genuine history, in a volume of "Murray's Family Library;"[22] and the
great "Elucidator" of Oliver Cromwell's mystifications condenses them
again into a single sentence, observing, with his usual buffoonery, that
"two of Oliver's _cousinry_ fled to New England, lived in caves there,
and had a sore time of it." And now comes the poem from Southey, full of
allusions to the same story, and, after all, giving only part of it; for
I do not see that any one has yet mentioned the fact, that _three_
regicides lived and died in America after the Restoration, and that
their sepulchres are there to this day.

In truth, the new poem led me to think there might be some value in a
certain MS. of my own,--mere notes of a traveller, indeed, but results
of a tour which I made in New England in the summer of 18--, during
which, besides visiting one of the haunts of the fugitives, I took the
pains to investigate all that is extant of their story. I found there a
queer little account of them, badly written, and worse arranged; the
work of one Dr. Stiles, who seems to have been something of a pious
Jacobin, and whose reverence for the murderers of King Charles amounts
almost to idolatry. He was president of Yale College, at Newhaven, and
thoroughly possessed of all the hate an