History of American Literature | Page 4

obligations to Archbishop Laud. It was his
overmastering hate of nonconformity, it was the vigilance and vigor
and consecrated cruelty with which he scoured his own diocese and
afterward all England, and hunted down and hunted out the ministers
who were committing the unpardonable sin of dissent, that conferred
upon the principal colonies of New England their ablest and noblest
men."
It should be noted that the Puritan colonization of New England took
place in a comparatively brief space of time, during the twenty years
from 1620 to 1640. Until 1640 persecution drove the Puritans to New
England in multitudes, but in that year they suddenly stopped coming.
"During the one hundred and twenty-five years following that date,
more persons, it is supposed, went back from the New to the Old
England than came from the Old England to the New," says Professor
Tyler. The year 1640 marks the assembling of the Long Parliament,
which finally brought to the block both Archbishop Laud (1645) and
King Charles I. (1649), and chose the great Puritan, Oliver Cromwell,
to lead the Commonwealth.
ELIZABETHAN TRAITS.--The leading men in the colonization of
Virginia and New England were born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth
(1558-1603), and they and their descendants showed on this side of the
Atlantic those characteristics which made the Elizabethan age
preeminent.
In the first place, the Elizabethans possessed initiative. This power
consists, first, in having ideas, and secondly, in passing from the ideas
to the suggested action. Some people merely dream. The Elizabethans
dreamed glorious dreams, which they translated into action. They
defeated the Spanish Armada; they circumnavigated the globe; they
made it possible for Shakespeare's pen to mold the thought and to

influence the actions of the world.
If we except those indentured servants and apprentices who came to
America merely because others brought them, we shall find not only
that the first colonists were born in an age distinguished for its initiative,
but also that they came because they possessed this characteristic in a
greater degree than those who remained behind. It was easier for the
majority to stay with their friends; hence England was not depopulated.
The few came, those who had sufficient initiative to cross three
thousand miles of unknown sea, who had the power to dream dreams of
a new commonwealth, and the will to embody those dreams in action.
In the second place, the Elizabethans were ingenious, that is, they were
imaginative and resourceful. Impelled by the mighty forces of the
Reformation and the Revival of Learning which the England of
Elizabeth alone felt at one and the same time, the Elizabethans craved
and obtained variety of experience, which kept the fountainhead of
ingenuity filled. It is instructive to follow the lives of Elizabethans as
different as Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Captain John Smith, and John Winthrop, and to note the varied
experiences of each. Yankee ingenuity had an Elizabethan ancestry.
The hard conditions of the New World merely gave an opportunity to
exercise to the utmost an ingenuity which the colonists brought with
them.
In the third place, the Elizabethans were unusually democratic; that is,
the different classes mingled together in a marked degree, more than in
modern England, more even than in the United States to-day. This
intermingling was due in part to increased travel, to the desire born of
the New Learning to live as varied and as complete a life as possible,
and to the absence of overspecialization among individuals. This
chance for varied experience with all sorts and conditions of men
enabled Shakespeare to speak to all humanity. All England was
represented in his plays. When the Rev. Thomas Hooker, born in the
last half of Elizabeth's reign, was made pastor at Hartford, Connecticut,
he suggested to his flock a democratic form of government much like
that under which we now live.

Let us remember that American life and literature owe their most
interesting traits to these three Elizabethan qualities--initiative,
ingenuity, and democracy. Let us not forget that the Cambridge
University graduate, the cooper, cloth-maker, printer, and blacksmith
had the initiative to set out for the New World, the ingenuity to deal
with its varied exigencies, and the democratic spirit that enabled them
to work side by side, no matter how diverse their former trades, modes
of life, and social condition.
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH, 1579-1631
[Illustration: JOHN SMITH]
The hero of the Jamestown colony, and its savior during the first two
years, was Captain John Smith, born in Willoughby, Lincolnshire, in
1579, twenty-four years before the death of Elizabeth and thirty-seven
before the death of Shakespeare. Smith was a man of Elizabethan
stamp,--active, ingenious, imaginative, craving new experiences. While
a mere boy, he could not stand the tediousness of ordinary life, and so
betook himself to the