The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees | Page 5

among the wits of London, and Bolingbroke wrote to Swift that he would "gladly exchange Europe for its charms--only not in a missionary capacity."
But Berkeley was not satisfied with mere subscriptions, and remembering what Lord Percival had said about the protection and aid of government he interceded with George the First, and obtained royal encouragement to hope for a grant of ￡20,000 to endow the Bermuda college. During the four years that followed, he lived in London, negotiating with brokers, and otherwise forwarding his enterprise of social idealism. With Queen Caroline, consort of George the Second, he used to dispute two days a week concerning his favourite plan.
At last his patience was rewarded. In September, 1728, we find him at Greenwich, ready to sail for Rhode Island. "Tomorrow," he writes on September 3 to Lord Percival, "we sail down the river. Mr. James and Mr. Dalton go with me; so doth my wife, a daughter of the late Chief Justice Forster, whom I married since I saw your lordship. I chose her for her qualities of mind, and her unaffected inclination to books. She goes with great thankfulness, to live a plain farmer's life, and wear stuff of her own spinning. I have presented her with a spinning-wheel. Her fortune was ￡2,000 originally, but travelling and exchange have reduced it to less than ￡1,500 English money. I have placed that, and about ￡600 of my own, in South Sea annuities."
Thus in the forty-fourth year of his life, in deep devotion to his Ideal, and full of glowing visions of a Fifth Empire in the West, Berkeley sailed for Rhode Island in a "hired ship of two hundred and fifty tons."
The New England Courier of that time gives this picture of his disembarkation at Newport: "Yesterday there arrived here Dean Berkeley, of Londonderry. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable, pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant manner."
[Illustration: WHITEHALL, NEWPORT, R. I.]
So favourably was Berkeley impressed by Newport that he wrote to Lord Percival: "I should not demur about situating our college here." And as it turned out, Newport was the place with which Berkeley's scheme was to be connected in history. For it was there that he lived all three years of his stay, hopefully awaiting from England the favourable news that never came.
In loyal remembrance of the palace of his monarchs, he named his spacious home in the sequestered valley Whitehall. Here he began domestic life, and became the father of a family. The neighbouring groves and the cliffs that skirt the coast offered shade and silence and solitude very soothing to his spirit, and one wonders not that he wrote, under the projecting rock that still bears his name, "The Minute Philosopher," one of his most noted works. The friends with whom he had crossed the ocean went to stay in Boston, but no solicitations could withdraw him from the quiet of his island home. "After my long fatigue of business," he told Lord Percival, "this retirement is very agreeable to me; and my wife loves a country life and books as well as to pass her time continually and cheerfully without any other conversation than her husband and the dead." For the wife was a mystic and a quietist.
But though Berkeley waited patiently for developments which should denote the realisation of his hopes, he waited always in vain. From the first he had so planned his enterprise that it was at the mercy of Sir Robert Walpole; and at last came the crisis of the project, with which the astute financier had never really sympathised. Early in 1730, Walpole threw off the mask. "If you put the question to me as a minister," he wrote Lord Percival, "I must and can assure you that the money shall most undoubtedly be paid--as soon as suits with public convenience; but if you ask me as a friend whether Dean Berkeley should continue in America, expecting the payment of ￡200,000, I advise him by all means to return to Europe, and to give up his present expectations."
When acquainted by his friend Percival with this frank statement, Berkeley accepted the blow as a philosopher should. Brave and resolutely patient, he prepared for departure. His books he left as a gift to the library of Yale College, and his farm of Whitehall was made over to the same institution, to found three scholarships for the encouragement of Greek and Latin study. His visit was thus far from being barren of results. He supplied a decided stimulus to higher education in the colonies, in that he gave out counsel and help to the men already working for the cause of learning in