This is my own my native land?"
Scott.
Boston: Published by Samuel G. Drake, No. 56 Cornhill. Printed by George Coolidge. 1845.
This is an exceedingly valuable and highly interesting work, and appears to have been written with great labor, and con amore. The author seems, as he says, "to have made a broad distinction between fact and tradition, and to have related nothing as fact, which he did not believe to be true." The representation of the character of the inhabitants of Newbury and their transactions, we think is accurately given, and seems to have been given "sine ira, sine studio." Copious extracts are made from the town records, and many from the church records, which latter exhibit more fully the peculiar traits of our ancestors.
The town of Newbury was originally one of the largest towns in the county, being about thirteen miles long, and about six miles broad in the widest place, and containing about thirty thousand acres, of which nearly two thousand were covered with water. In 1764 it was divided into two towns, Newbury and Newburyport, and in 1819 West Newbury was set off and incorporated as a separate town.
This volume is embellished with portraits of Dr. John Clarke, the physician in Newbury from 1637 to 1651, who died in Boston in 1664, aged 66, Chief-Justice Sewall, Rev. Mr. Whitefield, and Rev. Dr. Parish, and also with a map of the town and engravings of the old-town meeting-house which stood one hundred and six years, from 1700 to 1806, and of a house which "was infested with demons" in 1679, and where, "before the devil was chained up, the invisible hand did begin to put forth an astonishing visibility!" The Appendix, containing among other things a List of Grantees, and Genealogies of the First Settlers from 1635 to 1700, is a very important part of the work. The conclusion, comprising about fifty pages, is also valuable.
Brookline Jubilee. A Discourse delivered in Brookline, at the request of its Inhabitants, on 15 March, 1847, the day, which completed half a Century from his Ordination, by John Pierce, D. D., fifth minister of the first Congregational Church and Society in said town. Boston: James Munroe and Company. MDCCCXLVII.
The text on which this discourse is founded is in Psalm xxxvii: 25. "I have been young and now am old."
It is indeed pleasant in these "moving times," when ministers are not settled during even good behavior, but only so long as they please the fastidious taste of their people, to behold a pastor who has remained with his flock a long series of years, who stands among them, a relic of a former generation, to guide them by his counsels and guard them with his watchful care. It is alike honorable to the pastor and his people to meet in one common jubilee, to thank the bounteous Giver of all things for his mercies, and strengthen the ties which have so long bound them together. In the present case, however, not a church merely, but a whole town have united to honor one who may be regarded as their father, and whose name is identified with the town.