[341] Mass. Bay, ii. 78. Cf. Grahame, ii. 167. Douglass himself says with amusing confidence (Summary, etc., i. 356): “I have no personal disregard or malice, and do write of the present times, as if these things had been transacted 100 years since.”
[342] Vol. ii. pp. 151-157.
[343] Cf. Tuckerman’s America and her Commentators, p. 184.
[344] Summary, etc., i. 362.
[345] See Vol. III. p. 377.
[346] Cf. Alvah Hovey’s Life and Times of Isaac Backus, 1858, p. 281; and Sprague’s Annals of the Amer. Pulpit. It was while mainly depending on the Magnalia and Backus that H. F. Uhden wrote his Geschichte der Congregationalisten in Neu England bis 1740, of which there is an English version by H. C. Conant, New England Theocracy, Boston, 1858.
[347] An eminent Catholic authority, John G. Shea, in the Amer. Cath. Q. Rev., ix. (1884) p. 70, on “Puritanism in New England,” has said: “New England has framed not only her own history, but to a great extent the whole history of this country as it is generally read and popularly understood.... Schools made New Englanders a reading and writing people, and no subject was more palatable than themselves.... The consequence is that the works on New England history exceed those of all other parts of the country.... The general histories of the United States, like those of Bancroft and Hildreth, are written from the New England point of view, and Palfrey embodies in an especial manner the whole genius and development of their distinctive autonomy, with all the extenuating circumstances, the deprecating apologies, the clever and artistic arrangement in the background, of all that might offend the present taste.”
[348] See Vol. III. p. 344. Cf. also Chas. Deane’s Bibliog. Essay on Gov. Hutchinson’s historical publications (privately printed, 1857, as well as in the Hist. Mag., Apr., 1857, and Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc.) and Sabin’s Dictionary, xi. p. 22. Cf. Bancroft, United States, orig. ed., v. 228.
[349] Vol. III. p. 344. There is a rather striking portrait of Judge Minot (b. 1758; d. 1802), which is reproduced in heliotype in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., i. p. 42.
[350] Vol. III. p. 364. The MS. of Williamson’s History is in Harvard College library. Mr. John S. C. Abbott published a popular History of Maine at Boston in 1875.