“Not originally, and perhaps never, a member of the Pilgrim church, and possessing many traits which might have belonged to the fierce trooper, in an army whose cavalry was the legitimate descendant of Cæsar’s most formidable enemies,—the Batavi, celebrated for cavalry qualities, and long the body-guard of the Roman emperors,—the appearance of the somewhat violent soldier, in the saintly company of Parson Robinson’s church, is an anomaly.
“It has been proven many a time, from the days of Bannockburn, when the Scottish host sank on its knees to receive the benediction of the Black Abbot of Inchaffray, even to our own late day, when many of the best fighting regiments were blessed with the most earnest chaplains, that men never tender their lives more gallantly to God and mother-land than when they are fervently preached to and prayed for.
“Yet the all-daring contempt for peril, the roughness of temper, the masterly economy with which Standish saved human life by consumate indifference to personal homicide upon prudent occasion, his power of breathing his own fiery heart into a handful of followers, till he made them an army able to withstand a host in the narrow gates of death, would lead us to expect such a colleague for the saintly Brewster as little as we should expect to see Sheridan—
“‘Cavalry Sheridan,
Him of the horses and sabres we sing’—
prominent among the Methodists.
“In truth, with the poem of our sweetest and most cultured bard in our minds, and with the memory of those fierce monosyllables with which our great cavalry leader rolled back defeat upon the jubilant rebel host, and rescued victory at Winchester, fancy can depict the foaming black horse pressed into the rush of the shell-shattered guidons by the iron gripe of knees booted in “Cordovan leather,” and imagine that little Myles Standish rode that day in the saddle of little Phil. Sheridan.
“To the genealogist, who believes that names represent qualities and things, it is not unpleasing to find in the family record of Standish and Duxbury Hall, in the parish church of Chorley, Old England, the name Milo Standanaught. To stand at nothing, in the way of a duty commanded by the civil authority, seemed the essence of character in Myles Standish; and thoroughness stamps the reputation of the name and blood to-day.
“The materials for personal biography are scanty. His wife, Rose Standish,—an English rose,—whose very name augurs unfitness for a New England winter on an unsettled cape, died within a month of the landing. A light tradition exists that his second wife, Barbara, was her sister, whom he left an orphan child in England, and sent for. She arrived a woman grown, and the valorous captain added another illustration to the poet’s story, that Venus and the forger of thunderbolts were married.
“From the first anchorage, Captain Standish, as the soldier of the company, was charged with all deeds of adventure. At first, certain grave elders were sent with him for counsel. But ultimately his repute in affairs, both civil and military, was such that he was for many years the treasurer of the colony, and, during a period of difficulty, their agent in England. As a soldier, he was evidently the Von Moltke of the Pilgrims. They invested him with the general command. Even in extreme old age—the very year that he died “very auncient and full of dolorous paines”—he received his last and fullest commission against new enemies, his old friends, the Dutch.
“It is singular that among the primitive people, who must often in the later Indian wars have missed his counsel and conduct, as the poet describing Venice, sighs,—