This protégé was George Berkeley[2]--afterward Dean and Bishop--a most engaging and winning person then and always. Addison befriended this young philosopher, who wrote half a dozen papers for Steele's _Guardian_, with much of Steele's grace in them, and more than Steele's Christian earnestness. He went over to the Continent in the wake of a British Ambassador--was four or five years there, variously employed, equipping himself in worldly knowledge, and came back to warn[3] Englishmen against that extravagance and {5} greed for money, which had made possible the South-Sea disaster. New Yorkers might read the warning with profit now. For himself, he comes presently to the Deanship of Derry, and to a considerable legacy from that Miss Vanhomrigh--the acquaintance of an hour--so impressed had she been by Berkeley's promise of good. Nor was the promise ever belied. With an altruism unusual then, and unusual now, he braved the loss of his Deanship, and current friendships in England, and set his heart, his energies, and his fortune upon a scheme for building up the English colonies in America in ways of Christian living, and of learning. Long before, the devout George Herbert had said that Religion was "ready to pass to the American Strand;" and now Berkeley, fresh from the sight of dearth and decay in Europe, was earnest in the belief that Christian civilization was to win its greatest coming conquests "over seas." His enthusiasms had, for once, carried him into verse, of which a prophetic refrain has tingled in many an American ear:-- Westward the course of Empire takes its way! {6} The nidus of the good Dean's hopes and schemes lay in a great college which was to be built up in the Summer Islands (Bermuda) where the air "is perpetually fanned and kept cool by sea-breezes." But his stepping-stone on the way thither was Rhode Island; and for the harbor of Newport he sailed, with a few friends, and a newly married wife in the year 1728, after long and weary waiting for a grant, which at last is made good on parchment, but never made good in money. [Sidenote: Berkeley at Newport.]