Caleb Field

A Tale of the Puritans. BY THE AUTHOR OF “PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF MRS. MARGARET MAITLAND,” “MERKLAND,” &c.
“Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do; Not light them for ourselves: for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, ’twere all alike As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch’d, But to fine issues: nor Nature never lends The smallest scruple of her excellence, But like a thrifty goddess, she determines Herself the glory of a creditor, Both thanks and use.”—Measure for Measure.
NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 82 CLIFF STREET. 1851.


TO ROBERT BARBOUR, ESQ., MANCHESTER, AS ONE OF THE MOST LIBERAL AND WISE SUPPORTERS OF THAT CHURCH IN ENGLAND WHICH CLAIMS TO REPRESENT THE BRAVE AND GENTLE PRESBYTERIANS OF 1665, THIS TALE OF THE TRUE CHIVALRY OF THOSE TIMES Is respectfully Inscribed .
On no period of English history has so much been written, as on that singular age in which this kingdom acknowledged the sway of the Stuarts. Rife with controversies, which still are alive and strong, its every inch of ground contested, as vehemently almost by modern pens, as when the chivalry of England were met by the only army which could meet their high-born courage—the godly soldiers of Cromwell—the party feeling of its civil wars exists still among us. But we fight no longer with rapier and dagger; when death is braved, there is always a certain dignity in the warfare; but in these days we fall upon a safer mode of carrying on the struggle. We are not called upon to measure swords with the fiery Royalist, or the stern Ironside: so we betake ourselves to more ignoble weapons, which they did not at all times scorn to use—we call names.
And whereas the Royalist forces had decidedly the advantage of their graver antagonists in the use of these offensive weapons, it is perfectly natural, and in keeping, that this superiority should continue; and that as we find the hosts of epithets applied to the rulers of the Commonwealth and their followers, with all the accumulation of adjectives naturally conjoined to these, met only by the one stern word “malignant,” so by legitimate succession, the inheritors of Royalist opinions bring out the old projectiles still in all their original abundance, while those who represent the Roundheads, and fanatics of those days, not choosing to retain their own epithet of reproach, find little in the ancestral armory to meet these arrows withal. The more pacific mode is, perhaps, in this case the better policy, for there is little profit, and less honor, in maintaining a war of retaliation.