Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this willdernes; but they cried unto y^e Lord, and he heard their voyce, and looked on their adversitie, &c. Let them therefore praise y^e Lord, because he is good, & his mercies endure for ever. Yea, let them which have been redeemed of y^e Lord, shew how he hath delivered them from y^e hand of y^e oppressour. When they wandered in y^e deserte wildernes out of y^e way, and found no citie to dwell in, both hungrie, & thirstie, their sowle was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before y^e Lord his loving kindnes, and his wonderfull works before y^e sons of men._ * * * * * William Bradford, the great governor of the Plymouth colony, was born at Austerfield, a little village in Yorkshire, in 1588, the same year (the year of the Spanish Armada) that John Winthrop, the great governor of the Massachusetts colony, was born at Groton, in Suffolk. While yet a youth, he became a member of Brewster’s little congregation at Scrooby, near by; and in 1608 he escaped with the others to Holland, and became a leading member of the church at Leyden, taking an active part in the removal to New England in 1620. Upon Carver’s death, in 1621, he was elected to succeed him as governor; and he continued to hold this office, with two slight breaks, to the time of his death, in 1657. No other person understood so well the history of the Plymouth colony. It is therefore singularly fortunate that he became the colony’s historian,--as, similarly, Gov. Winthrop became the historian of the Massachusetts colony. His “History of the Plymouth Plantation” may properly be called our New England Old Testament,--the Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, and Judges of the Plymouth settlement. The remarkable story of the loss of the MS. from the Old South Meeting-house, where it was preserved in the Prince Library, at the time of the British Evacuation of Boston, and its discovery in the Bishop of London’s library at Fulham in 1855, has been told by Charles Deane in his introduction to the volume, published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and in the _Proceedings_ of the Society, 1855 and 1882; also, more fully, by Justin Winsor, in the _Proceedings_ for 1882. It is an interesting fact that the third volume of Winthrop’s History, long lost, was found, in 1816, in the tower of the Old South Meeting-house, where, like Bradford’s History, it had been kept in Prince’s New England Library.