It is not too fanciful to say that with those stern words of Governor Bradford the English Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a lawless liberty which has been dreamed and dreamed out so many times in the history of the world was over, for many a day. It was only a hundred years earlier that Rabelais had written over the doors of his ideal abbey, the motto "Do what thou wilt." It is true that Rabelais proposed to admit to his Abbey of Thélème only such men and women as were virtuously inclined. We do not know how many persons would have been able and willing to go into residence there. At any rate, two hundred years went by in New England after the fall of Morton before any notable spirit dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance ideal. At last, in Emerson's doctrine that all things are lawful because Nature is good and human nature is divine, we have a curious parallel to the doctrine of Rabelais. It was the old romance of human will under a new form and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the hard facts of human nature reasserted themselves and put this romantic transcendentalism by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put by that heavily loaded fowling-piece of the drunken Morton. But men believed in miracles in the first century of colonization, and they will continue at intervals to believe in them until human nature is no more. The marvellous happenings recorded in Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_ no longer excite us to any "suspension of disbelief." We doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh romantic enthusiasm of a settler like Crèvecoeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does the romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand concerning the Mississippi and the Choctaws, or the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over their dream of a "panti-Socratic" community in the unknown valley of the musically-sounding Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual feeder of the springs of romance. John Wesley, it will be remembered, went out to the colony of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting the Indians; but as he naïvely remarks in his _Journal_, he "neither found or heard of any Indians on the continent of America, who had the least desire of being instructed." The sense of fact, in other words, supervenes, and the glory disappears from the face of romance. The humor of Mark Twain's _Innocents Abroad_ turns largely upon this sense of remorseless fact confronting romantic inexperience.