The preceding letter bears an incidental testimony to the various learning of Milton, and it implies, that Mr. Williams was sufficiently versed in the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch and French languages, to teach them. It shows, moreover, that, like Milton himself, and Dr. Johnson, and other distinguished men, Mr. Williams employed himself in the honorable office of an instructor of youth; an office worthy of the most gifted mind, and which ranks, in the estimate of sober reason, second to no other function, except that of the teacher of religion. This fact is the more honorable to Mr. Williams, because he became a teacher, as a means of subsistence, while he was serving his colony in England.[287] In the following letter to the town of Providence, Mr. Williams alludes, in affecting terms, to his toils and sacrifices, and to the ungrateful requital with which they had been met by some individuals: “Well beloved friends and neighbors, “I am like a man in a great fog. I know not well how to steer. I fear to run upon the rocks at home, having had trials abroad. I fear to run quite backward, as men in a mist do, and undo all that I have been a long time undoing myself to do, viz. to keep up the name of a people, a free people, not enslaved to the bondages and iron yokes of the great (both soul and body) oppressions of the English and barbarians about us, nor to the divisions and disorders within ourselves. Since I set the first step of any English foot into these wild parts, and have maintained a chargeable and hazardous correspondence with the barbarians, and spent almost five years’ time with the state of England, to keep off the rage of the English against us, what have I reaped of the root of being the stepping-stone of so many families and towns about us, but grief, and sorrow, and bitterness? I have been charged with folly for that freedom and liberty which I have always stood for; I say liberty and equality, both in land and government. I have been blamed for parting with Moshassuck, and afterward Pawtuxet, (which were mine own as truly as any man’s coat upon his back,) without reserving to myself a foot of land, or an inch of voice in any matter, more than to my servants and strangers. It hath been told me that I labored for a licentious and contentious people; that I have foolishly parted with town and colony advantages, by which I might have preserved both town and colony in as good order as any in the country about us. This, and ten times more, I have been censured for, and at this present am called a traitor, by one party, against the state of England, for not maintaining the charter and the colony; and it is said that I am as good as banished by yourselves, and that both sides wished that I might never have landed, that the fire of contention might have had no stop in burning. Indeed, the words have been so sharp between myself and some lately, that at