Dr. Palfrey tells this story concisely, but emphatically. He takes two stages of the Puritan development in England, from which to deduce respectively the emigration to Plymouth and to Massachusetts Bay. Stopping at intervals to make intelligible the perplexities connected with the patents and charters, his narrative is thenceforward continuous, admitting new threads to be woven into it as the pattern and the fabric both become richer. For the first time we have the full connection presented in solid history between the Scrooby Church and Plymouth Colony. And the tracing is beautifully done. An artist may find his paintings in these pages. Our poets may here find themes which will be the more tempting and rewarding, the more closely they are held to severe historic verity. They will find, that, after all, the most promising materials for the imagination to deal with are facts. The residence of the exiles in Holland, their debates and arrangements with respect to a more distant remove, the ocean passage, the first forlorn experiences during two winters at Plymouth, are vividly presented. The paragraph, on page 182, beginning, "A visitor to Plymouth," gives us a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall. If the sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in the most direful and needless self-inflictions. "Why could they not have been content to cling to the comforts of Old England, and to restrain their wilfulness of spirit?" The question is answered now differently from what it would have been then. We have used one wrong word about those exiles, in speaking of them as _cowering_ under their woes. They did not _cower_, but _breasted _them.