enabled him to pluck from business and from sleep, he was ready, in July, 1764, amid the first mutterings of that political storm which was to play havoc with these peaceful studies and to shatter the hopes of his lifetime, to send to the printer, in Boston, the first volume of _The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay_. He published his second volume in the early summer of the year 1767,--not far from the very day on which Parliament, by the passage of the Townshend Act, perpetrated the ineffable folly of plunging the empire into such tumults as led to its disruption. Notwithstanding the lurid and bitter incidents amid which it was written, the second volume of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts, like the first one, has the tone of moderation and of equanimity suggestive of a philosopher abstracted from outward cares, and devoted to the disinterested discovery and exposition of the truth. From the time of the publication of the second instalment of his work, sixty-one years were to elapse before the public should receive ocular evidence that the author had had the fortitude, amid the calamities which overwhelmed his later years, to go on with his historical labours, and to complete a third and final volume, telling the story of Massachusetts from the year 1750 until the year 1774--the year in which he laid down his office as governor and departed for England. Borne down with sorrow, amazed and horror-stricken at the fury of the storm that was overturning his most prudent calculations, and was sweeping him and his party from all their moorings out into an unknown sea, he found some solace in resuming in England the historical task which he had left unfinished. In his diary for October 22, 1778, its completion is recorded in this modest note: “I finished the revisal of my History, to the end of my Administration, and laid it by.” Laid by certainly it was, and not until the year 1828 was it permitted to come forth to the light of day, and then, largely, through the magnanimous intervention of a group of noble-minded American scholars in the very city which, in his later lifetime, would not have permitted his return to it.