While here he was the warm friend of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson; and when he went home he carried back with him the same ardor for Christian truth which had impelled him to grasp hands with Winthrop in the wilderness. He had a heart, and “he was happy in the possession of an admirable genius, though naturally more inclined to contemplative excellence than to action. He was happy, too, in the eulogist of his virtues; for Milton, ever parsimonious of praise, reserving the majesty of his verse to celebrate the glories and vindicate the providence of God, was lavish of his encomiums on the youthful friend of religious liberty. But Vane was still more happy in attaining early in life a firmly-settled theory of morals, and in possessing an energetic will, which made all his conduct to the very last conform to the doctrines he had espoused, turning his dying hour into a seal of witness, which his life had ever borne with noble consistency to the freedom of conscience and the people. ‘If he were not superior to Hampden,’ says Clarendon, ‘he was inferior to no other man;’ ‘his whole life made good the imagination that there was in him something extraordinary.’”[1045] Bluff John Endicott was another of the famous characters whose names and fame are impressed on the vellum of colonial history. He is said to have been perhaps the finest specimen of the genuine Puritan character to be found among the early governors. “He was quick of temper, with strong religious feelings; resolute to uphold with the sword what he had received as gospel truth; and feared no enemy so much as a gainsaying spirit. He tore the cross out of the English flag, cut down the May-pole at Merry-Mount, rakish Morton’s sometime den, published his detestation of long hair in a formal proclamation, and set dissenters in the pillory. Inferior to Winthrop in learning—in comprehension to Vane—in tolerance even to Dudley—he excelled them all in the keen eye to discern the fit moment for action, in the quick resolve to profit by it, and in the hand always ready to strike.”[1046] These are a few of the central figures, the pivotal men, of the first half dozen Pilgrim decades in New England. There are many more almost equally eminent and worthy of immortal honor—Bradstreet, and Hopkins, and Eaton, and the younger Winthrop. Here is an _embarras des richesses_, and neither time nor space serves to name the lengthened list of worthies who lent lustre and dignity to the colonial annals. The best of them were the peers of the first men of any age or country; and the worst more than met the requirements of the Latins in their rulers: “The Roman people,” says Cicero, “selected their magistrates as if they were to be stewards of the republic. Proficiency in other departments, if it existed, they gladly tolerated; but if such additional accomplishments were lacking, they were content with the virtue and honesty of their public servants.”[1047]