The communion left, on the simple and unpractised offspring of the Puritans, its impression both of good and evil. The inhabitants of the country, while they derived, from the intercourse, a portion of that bland and graceful courtesy for which the gentry of the southern British colonies were so distinguished did not fail to imbibe some of those peculiar notions, concerning the distinctions in the races of men, for which they are no less remarkable Rhode Island was the foremost among the New England provinces to recede from the manners and opinions of their simple ancestors. The first shock was given, through her, to that rigid and ungracious deportment which was once believed a necessary concomitant of true religion, a sort of outward pledge of the healthful condition of the inward man; and it was also through her that the first palpable departure was made from those purifying principles which might serve as an apology for even far more repulsive exteriors. By a singular combination of circumstances and qualities, which is, however, no less true than perplexing, the merchants of Newport were becoming, at the same time, both slave-dealers and gentlemen. Whatever might have been the moral condition of its proprietors at the precise period of 1759, the island itself was never more enticing and lovely. Its swelling crests were still crowned with the wood of centuries; its little vales were then covered with the living verdure of the north; and its unpretending but neat and comfortable villas lay sheltered in groves, and embedded in flowers. The beauty and fertility of the place gained for it a name which, probably, expressed far more than was, at that early day, properly understood. The inhabitants of the country styled their possessions the “Garden of America.” Neither were their guests, from the scorching plains of the south, reluctant to concede so imposing a title to distinction. The appellation descended even to our own time; nor was it entirely abandoned, until the traveller had the means of contemplating the thousand broad and lovely vallies which, fifty years ago, lay buried in the dense shadows of the forest.