knows, too, that familiarity with mankind comes partly from affection for it, and that the truth is therefore not unrelated to affection. How then shall he tell the truth about the provinces so long as he feels nothing but animosity for them? It was not in this temper that Fielding drew Squire Western, or Scott his Caleb Balderstone, or Balzac poor stupid Père Goriot. After long years in which this temper has sweetened and softened American fiction too much, we do indeed need more iron in it. But likewise it is well to remember that hatred rarely speaks the last word. WHAT THE FATHERS READ The later Elizabethans and the Jacobeans thought of the realm of Britain as comprising England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia—the fourth of these provinces being a more or less natural outlet for the energy of men who, cramped at home, had to seek gold or glory or adventure in wider regions. As the century advanced there grew up in the parent islands a party who felt no less cramped by theology than by geography, and they turned their imaginations to New England, where, it seemed, the faith might grow in the way they wanted. Certain of the proletarian members of this group went to Plymouth and a more prosperous body shortly afterwards to Boston, but neither they nor the sympathizers left behind understood that the saints had been really sundered by the emigration. Not for a century and more did the inhabitants of Boston and thereabouts, in Massachusetts, cease to look towards London as their cultural capital much as they had looked towards it while they lived in and near Boston in Lincolnshire; they were further removed, and that was all. The tongue that Shakespeare spoke, the faith and morals Milton held.... The Puritans in New England, indeed, knew or cared little enough about Shakespeare. The late Thomas Goddard Wright’s scrupulous researches have unearthed no signs that Shakespeare’s works reached the Puritan colonies before 1722, when the reprobated James Franklin announced that he had them at the office of the _New England Courant_ for any writer who might want to use them; or before 1723, when Harvard, also under fire for its lack of orthodoxy, listed them in its library catalogue. Nor was even Milton greatly valued for his poetry, though four copies of _Paradise Lost_ are known to have been shipped to Boston in 1683; though Cotton Mather clearly knew the epic; though Yale received a gift, among other books, of all Milton’s poetical works in 1714; and though Harvard in 1721-22 acquired “a new & fair Edicon” in two volumes (probably Tonson’s noble quartos of 1720). Mather once or twice quotes Chaucer, whose writings were in both the Yale and Harvard libraries by 1723; Anne Bradstreet makes a solitary—and conventional—reference to “Spencer’s poetry”; her father, Gov. Thomas Dudley, curiously enough, possessed the “Vision of Piers Plowman.” But on the whole there was scanty demand in New England for imaginative literature of any kind.