were desirous of purchasing the fair island of Rhode Island, Williams, together with Sir Henry Vane, "obtained it for them by love." Later in life, he was in the habit of going once a month into the Narraganset territory to preach the gospel to the inhabitants; and not long before his death, so great was still his influence among them, that, when some of Philip's forces came to attack Providence, it is said that he took his staff, and went boldly out alone to meet them. The fact that Williams was an exile from the Bay probably went far towards rendering him a welcome guest among the Narragansets; for they hated both the Indians of Massachusetts, and the whites who protected them. But this was by no means the sole cause of his friendly reception. He always maintained their right to the soil of this country. He always made them, in his purchases, such generous compensation as they desired. He "spared no cost towards them, in tokens and presents "; and so much did they rely upon his bounty, that, when the aged Canonicus was about to die, he sent for his friend, Mr. Williams, and "desired to be buried in his cloth of free gift." It must be added, however, that Williams participated in what is now considered the wrong of Indian slavery. But it was the practice of the times. The articles of the early New England confederacy enumerate slaves among the spoils of war. The noble-minded Winthrop left legacies of Indians' to his heirs. In most of the Colonies, the Indians taken prisoners by the English were sent out of the country, and sold into perpetual slavery; but at Providence, they were disposed of to the inhabitants, and only for a short period. As early as the year 1652, the authorities of Providence and Warwick passed laws forbidding under severe penalties the retaining of slaves longer than ten years, or the selling of them at the expiration of that time; and in 1676, with a philanthropy remarkable in those days, the former Colony enacted, "that no Indian in this Colony be a slave, but only to pay their debts, or for their bringing up, or custody they have received, or to perform covenant, as if they had been countrymen, and not taken in war." The private life and temper, as well as the public services of Roger Williams, are such as his descendants may look back upon with pride and pleasure. We will not deny, that, as he lived in an age of bitter controversies and punctilious observances in religion, he partook of its disputatious character, and sometimes contended needlessly in matters of trifling import. As a dissenter from the opinions of his brethren both in this country and England, he was not a little pertinacious in the maintenance of his peculiar sentiments. The opposition he met with, first in founding a new colony, and afterwards in managing the turbulent spirits that resorted to it, caused him often to appear self-willed and intractable. So far, Williams was under the influences of his age and of peculiar circumstances; but his virtues were his own, and they were many. To borrow the language of his biographer, "he was magnanimous and benevolent, patient of suffering and forgiving of injuries, and unwavering in his devotion to the interests of truth, and liberty, and virtue." The asperities of his character were greatly softened down by the experiences of life. No man ever more fully illustrated the Christian doctrine of forgiveness of injuries. If at Salem he was, in any sense, a fomenter of strife, at Providence, on all occasions, he was a friend of peace. He was never free, indeed, from strong antipathies; but the number of his private and public charities more than covered them all. He had a lively temperament and keen sensibilities, united with great stability of character; his disposition was eager and fiery, but controlled by great soundness of judgment, and a "rocky strength" of principle. His writings, of which an interesting account may be found in an Appendix to the Life, are frequently enlivened with flights of fancy and wit; the gravity of theological disquisition is sometimes relieved by learned references to history, and occasional allusions to the classics. His poetry is little better than quaint doggerel, and his prose style has all the intricacy and the cumbersomeness of the old Puritan writers; but both manifest qualities of mind, which, under more genial culture, might have commanded the admiration of a more refined and tasteful age. Viewed as a public character, Roger Williams was one of the most remarkable personages of early New England history. The Puritans of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were not behind their age; but he was in advance of it. Other Englishmen had entertained the idea of religious toleration; but he was the first of them to reduce it to practice. He saw this principle clearly, he followed it out consistently, he suffered for it heroically. Jew or Christian, infidel or pagan, Arminian or Quaker, Familist or Tunker, were all welcome in Providence Plantations, "so long as human orders, in point of civility, were not corrupted or violated." The community as first formed by him at Providence was an attempt to show that every man might be his own ruler, and every man his own priest; though, when the impracticability of the scheme became apparent upon the increase of the Colony, he gradually introduced the principle of representative government, and surrounded individual freedom with the salutary restraints of constitutional law. As Americans, ⚫ desirous of giving to the great experiment of popular institutions a fair trial in this country, we are bound to revere the memory of that man, who was foremost in establishing here those maxims of civil and ecclesiastical law, which have since been universally adopted as the foundations of our liberties. The other biographies contained in this volume, the Life of President Dwight by Dr. William B. Sprague, and the Life of Count Pulaski by Mr. Sparks, the editor of the "Library," we are not able to notice at present. It is enough to say of them, that they are written with ability and care, presenting a succinct narrative of all that is known in the career of these two distinguished persons, and an impartial and satisfactory estimate of their characters and services. ART. II. Histoire du Pape Grégoire VII., et de son Siècle, d'après les Monuments Originaux. Par J. VOIGT, Professeur à l'Université de Halle. Traduite de l'Allemand, par M. L'ABBÉ JAger. Paris A. Vaton, Libraire-Éditeur. 1838. 2 Tomes. 8vo. men SURELY it is a good sign for our age, that we have such historians as Hallam, Ranke, Hurter, and Voigt, who can see truth and excellence out of their own peculiar range of association, their own school of truth and excellence. And surely it is a good sign for Protestantism, which has ever tended so much to worship that intolerance which is the Antichrist of her faith, that such historians are rising among her sons; men who can see good as well as evil in the Western Christendom of the Middle Ages, and who dare show to their contemporaries, that the spirit of wisdom and reformation was not reserved for our perfect days aone; and yet who are not Puseyites or Patristics of any school, but earnest, free-spoken Lutherans. And among these writers, there is no one who has given himself to an age more worthy of thorough and careful ex- . amination than the one selected by Voigt. It was the age of Hildebrand, of William the Norman, of the white-haired, firm-hearted, well-taught Lanfranc, of Abelard, and Bernard of Clairvaux, and the wise Mussulmans of Spain; the age of rising cities, of consolidating feudalism, of literature beginning to breathe, of democracy struggling to be born. -- Since Christianity came to man, but one great element has been introduced into European life; this was the intermingling of the Northern barbarians with the civilized, Christianized, degraded Romans of the South; the marriage of the fairhaired Teuton with his half-enslaved brunette bride. And a fierce wedding it was, a dance of torches and of swords. For five hundred years, Frank crowded on Burgundian and Visigoth; farther Frank on nearer; Saxon on the farthest Frank; Slave and Hun on him; all was bloodshed, license, licentiousness, turmoil, robbery, and woe. A prayer for aid, a cry as of millions in mortal agony, rose unceasingly toward heaven. The ploughman stood idle, with hopeless, down-cast eye; the hammer of the blacksmith hung in midair, as he thought how fruitless was his labor; the merchant stole along the hedges, shrinking from the eye of the passer, and stepped into rivers cautiously, seeking a ford, lest the man at the bridge should rob him. Over all the West of Europe, the wassail-song of the baron, the mocking laugh of the bandit, the shriek of the virgin, the nasal twang of priestly insult to God, were the only sounds which rose above the chaos of inarticulate moaning and heartfelt prayer, that came from the half-cultured country and halfdeserted town. For a time, the reign of Charlemagne acted like oil upon the waters; but the day which God gave him passed by, and all was storm again; he came as a sunbeam in a dark day, as a meteor in the tempest, dazzling and wonderful, but shedding no permanent, abiding light. Into the darkness of that tempest let us cast a glance, and try to see a clear outline or two in its great depths. It is a law of God, that a new organization shall always be preceded by the entire dissolution of what has gone before. The mineral will crystallize anew, only after it has been completely dissolved; the vegetable and the animal must be decomposed, before their elements can recombine into other forms of life. So, too, a new society can arise, only when the old one has been wholly dissolved, its atoms freed from each other, and its old arrangements broken up, so that every particle is at liberty to become part of the new living frame, according to some other law than that which governed the formation of the old social unit. The Roman world had to be ground down and dissolved by barbarian and Christian influences, before the formation of modern society became possible. Whose eyes can watch these processes, through the dust and fumes which rise from them? From Clovis to Hugh Capet, the grinding and fermenting cease not; and it is only within the eleventh century, when every baron, in his stone nest upon the hilltop, rejoices in utter independence of law and government, that we see the freed molecules of society ready to combine anew; while within the same age, in the completed feudalism of France, the rising power of the Church, the birth of the Communes, and the song of the Troubadour, are discernible the first floating filaments of the world in which we live. When the decomposing process was completed, society may be said to have ceased, while each family and individual, passing also through a modified chaos, acquired new ideas and tended to new organizations. To use the language of electrology, each atom acquired a new polarization. Chivalry, female influence, loyalty, romantic devotion, were then born within each separate household. Virtues, which had been unknown to Roman, German, or Christian, sprang into being from the commingling of all these elements. Would we see a man of those times, of the first half of the eleventh century, barbarian-Christian, chaotic and contradictory? Let us take the following portrait, sketched by William of Malmesbury. Old Foulques Nerra, Count of Anjou, having for many long years governed his county with glory, and, one act excepted, with honor, at length gave the active administration into the hands of his son, Geoffrey Martel, a haughty, quarrelsome young fellow, who, not content |