The library in the City Hall was yet quite a new thing, the church called Trinity had stood on the historic ground but a few years, the French church was barely completed, and the town was so sprightly and full of activity that 't is small wonder Madame Sarah Knight, coming at such a time, should find much to wonder at and to write about. Her coming marks another advance in literary New York, for Madame Knight was a bookish woman come from far-off Boston town, and was a teacher well versed in the "art of composition." She found all quite different as compared with her own Massachusetts, where her father had been sentenced to stand for two hours in the stocks, his conduct having been found "lewd and unseemly" when, on a Sabbath day, after an absence of three years, he had kissed his wife when she met him at his own door-step! No wonder Madame Knight thought New York society quite gay and reckless, for at this time Lord Cornbury governed, and he had an odd fancy for wearing women's clothing indoors for his own delectation and to the amusement of the citizens as he walked the walls of the fort. Though Madame Knight met many persons of quality and witnessed many interesting scenes, had her visit in the city been extended, say for half a dozen years, until the coming of Governor Robert Hunter, she would have met a man truly in full accord with her ideas and tastes.
Had Governor Hunter's hopes been fulfilled there might have been a far different writing of literary history. He came from England in the summer of 1710, from the midst of a busy and troublous life, seeing before him in imagination quiet and peaceful years with the wife he cherished, and a career which should be helped on by his correspondence with his English friends, Dean Swift, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, and some others. It would be an ideal life; he had planned it well. But the repose he sought he scarce for an hour realized. Undreamed-of turmoil kept him in a whirl of unsettledness. And though the wife of his heart stood by his side, and he gained comfort from knowing that nothing could turn her away, differences with the Government at home, which refused to reimburse him for money spent; wrangling with the Assembly, which refused money for the conduct of affairs in the colony; the uprising of negro slaves; the turbulent actions of unfriendly Indians—these things and others left him never an hour for the work he had planned. It was a note of despair that he sounded when he wrote to Swift across the sea:
This is the finest air to live upon in the universe, and if our trees and birds could speak and our Assemblymen be silent, the finest conversation also. The soil bears all things, but not for me.... In a word, and to be serious, I have spent my time here in such torment and vexation that nothing hereafter in life can ever make amends for it.
Still, for all this, he found time for some writing, especially for a play, the one called Androborus—The Man-eater,—in which he wrote in such a bantering, humorous, satirical manner of the colonial officers as to set the town going with laughter. From this on he got along better and the people came to appreciate their Governor. Gradually there centred about the house in the fort a "Court Circle," where the Lady Hunter shone brightly, not alone because she was the first lady of the province, nor because her husband was Governor and a writer, but because others came to know her as a loving, lovely, and lovable woman. But when it looked as though the Governor was to have at last the ease and rest and quiet he had hoped for from the beginning, Lady Hunter died! This was the worst that could happen to Robert Hunter. There was nothing more for him to live and struggle for, he said. He resigned his office and, before many years, his life.
At this time of the "Court Circle," a mild, quiet man, the son of a Presbyterian minister, came from Philadelphia to visit the Governor. And no one could foresee that this Cadwallader Colden would remain during the rest of his life and be, for almost half a century, the leader of literary New York.
Colden came to be a friend of William Bradford, as he had been of Hunter, and watched his work with deep interest. He often advised Bradford when that first printer of New York published the New York Gazette, in 1725, the first newspaper in the city, and upheld him a few years later when the second newspaper was issued by Bradford's old apprentice boy, Peter Zenger, who had become his rival.
In the first ten years that Colden lived in New York he wrote diligently, and published his History of the Five Nations, an exhaustive work telling of the powerful Indian tribes, of their forms of government, and their wars. This was one of the earliest books of importance, and he was planning a second part of this same history when, in the year 1732, Cosby came to be Governor. In after years Colden told how his studies and his writings were interrupted by the coming of the new and lively Governor.
