It is, I suppose, our inheritance from the Puritans, or the worst of our inheritance from the Puritans, and it is possible that it is worth while to have paid the penalty as a price for the best we derived from them, since one has to take the bad with the good, though in those days I often wished that the bequest had gone to some other of the heirs. Perhaps in thus speaking of the good we had from them, I am merely yielding to the fear of saying openly what I have often thought, namely, that the good we had from the Puritans has been immensely overestimated and exaggerated, and is not one whit better or greater in quantity or influence than that we had from the Cavaliers, or for that matter from the latest emigrant on Ellis Island. They themselves appreciated their own goodness, and we have always taken their words for granted. I have often thought that some day, when I had the elegant leisure necessary to such a task, I should like to write “A History of Puritanism,” or, since I should have to place the beginnings of the monumental work in Rome as far back at least as the reign of the first Emperor, perhaps I should be less ambitious and content myself with writing “A History of Puritanism in the United States of America.” I should have to begin the larger work at that interesting period of the history of Rome when the weary Augustus was being elected and reëlected president against his will and trying to gratify the spirit of Puritanism that was even in such people as those Romans, by enacting all sorts of sumptuary laws and foolish prohibitions, and trying out to miserable failures every single one of the proposals that have since that time been made over and over again in the hope of regenerating mankind. The story of how the Emperor’s own daughter was almost the first to disobey his regulations is dramatic enough to conclude rather than to begin any history, and yet I could write it with much more pity than I could the story of those Puritans who abounded in my own locality in my own time. To write fairly and philosophically of them I should have to wait not only for a leisure so large and so elegant that I am certain never to have it, but I should have to cultivate a philosophic calm which I own with shame is far from me when I think of some of the things they, or some of them, did in their efforts to force their theories on others. I should not recall such things now, and if I were to put them in that monumental and scholarly work of my imagination, it should be, of course, only in the cold scientific spirit, and as specimens, say in nonpariel type, at the foot of the page with the learned annotations. XLII