We have a picture of the landing at Newport, on a winter day early in 1729. “Yesterday arrived here Dean Berkeley of Londonderry, in a pretty large ship. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable, pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant manner. ’Tis said he proposes to tarry here with his family about three months(18).” Newport was then a flourishing town, nearly a century old, an emporium of American commerce, in those days the rival of Boston and New York. He was “never more agreeably surprised,” he says, than “at the size of the town and harbour.” Around him was some of the softest rural and grandest ocean scenery in the world, which had fresh charms even for one whose boyhood was spent in the valley of the Nore, who had lingered in the Bay of Naples, and wandered in Inarime and among the mountains of Sicily. He was seventy miles from Boston, and about as far from Newhaven and Yale College. A range of hills crosses the centre of the island, whence meadows slope to the rocky shore. The Gulf Stream tempers the surrounding sea. “The people,” he tells Percival, “are industrious; and though less orthodox have not less virtue, and I am sure they have more regularity, than those I left in Europe. They are indeed a strange medley of different persuasions.” The gentry retained the customs of the squires in England: tradition tells of a cheerful society: the fox chase, with hounds and horses, was a favourite recreation. The society, for so remote a region, was well informed. The family libraries and pictures which remain argue culture and refinement. Smibert, the artist of the missionary party, who had moved to Boston, soon found employment in America, and his pictures still adorn houses in Rhode Island(19). The Dean and his young wife lived in Newport for some months after their arrival. Mr. Honeyman, a missionary of the English Society, had been placed there, in Trinity Church, in 1704. The church is still a conspicuous object from the harbour. Berkeley preached in it three days after his arrival, and occasionally afterwards. Notes of his sermons are included in this edition among his Miscellaneous Works.