their ships, at that late day, in carrying negroes on "the middle passage" from Guinea to the southern ports of the United States; but with a remarkable lack of mercantile shrewdness, they were bringing slaves from Africa to Newport, and there selling them to southern customers. pp. 153, 155. Just at this time the simple-minded pastor, having long meditated on the slave trade and on slavery, and having signalized himself by his endeavors to instruct and Christianize the blacks of the place, comes to the conclusion that the enslaving of those people and the trade that brings them from Africa, are wrong; and "finding in his former blindness and the comparative dumbness which he has heretofore maintained on this subject, much wherewith to reproach himself," (p. 159,) he determines to relieve his conscience by speaking out. He makes his first experiment in a private conference with a wealthy member of his own church, a zealously Hopkinsian slave-trader, who accepts with high-flying zeal the most paradoxical deductions from the doctrine and duty of disinterested benevolence, but revolts instantaneously and violently from the proposal to give up his African trade for the sake of God's glory which consists in the highest happiness of the universe. On the same day, he makes a second experiment with better success; and at his suggestion Mr. Zebedee Marvyn, the father of James, emancipates his two African servants, Candace and her husband Cato. In the course of the same week there is a large wedding party at the house of one of the wealthiest and most. aristocratic families in the place. There all the historic personages of the story meet, Hopkins, Stiles, and Burr; for Dr. Stiles is still the pastor of the Second Congregational church; and "Colonel Burr, of the United States Senate," happens to be in Newport, just at this time, busy in some political intrigue. At that gay and brilliant party it is whispered about that Dr. Hopkins has denounced the slave trade, and will preach against it on the next Sunday. Consequently his dilapidated old meeting house is filled for once with a polite and fashionable congregation, who are indignant at the strange doctrine. The story goes forward a year, and then there comes the news that the ship in which James Marvyn sailed from

Newport has been lost with all on board save the one who like one of Job's messengers was left to bring the tidings home. Again the story goes forward, and, after a few months, the broken-hearted Mary, through the mediation of her mother, has consented to become the wife of Dr. Hopkins. But just as preparations for the wedding are almost finished, James, who has been saved from the wreck of his ship by one of the many chances that are always at the service of a poet or a novelist, comes home alive and hearty, and not only so but rich. The old theologian, in the true spirit of disinterested benevolence, being informed of what in his unobservant simplicity he has never suspected, namely, that James is to Mary the object of a tenderer and more passionate affection than she could ever feel toward her revered and paternal pastor, makes, voluntarily and heroically, the sacrifice of his brightest hopes for this world, and gives Mary to her lover. Then we are informed that in time, the Doctor himself, though of course well stricken in years, "married a woman of a fair countenance, and that sons and daughters grew up around him." In time, too, his System of Divinity was published, and "proved a success not only in public acceptance and esteem, but even in a temporal view, bringing to him at last a modest competence." "To the last of a very long life," he was "ever saying and doing what he saw to be eternally right, without the slightest consultation with worldly expediency or earthly gain, nor did his words cease to work in New England till the evils he opposed were finally done away."

We have no intention of pronouncing or implying any judg ment on the plot of the Minister's Wooing, considered merely as a story. Nor is it our purpose to inquire how far the personages of the story, considered as creations of the author's mind, are true to human nature, and to the peculiar development of human nature under the religious and social influences of Puritan New England. Indeed, we are too late for such an inquiry. On that point, the verdict of all who know anything about New England life as it was some forty years ago, is already declared. It is also our purpose to avoid entirely, at present, the question which has been raised, in some minds, about the theological relations and tendencies of

the work. That matter comes fairly within our jurisdiction, but if we should enter upon it now-undertaking to decide whether the doubts and opinions which purport to come from James Marvyn, or from his mother, or from Candace, or from Madame de Frontignac, and which deviate from the standards of Calvinism, are to be regarded as the opinions and teachings of Mrs. Stowe; and if so, whether she should not be held equally responsible for the sayings of Simeon Brown, the slave-merchant-we should find no space for anything else within the limits of the present Article. What we have in hand at present, is simply the relation of this book to the truth of history.

man.

We begin, then, with the hero of the story, Samuel Hopkins. Undoubtedly, one leading object of the book is to present the honest and simple father of Hopkinsian Calvinism, truly and favorably, though in a picturesque and poetical way, to the million readers of this generation who have little knowledge of the man or of his doctrines, and to whom there is no charm in his "reasonings high, of fate, free-will, foreknowledge," and the nature of virtue. Hopkins was made classical, many years ago, by the late Dr. Channing, who, in a discourse at Newport, gave his personal reminiscences of the venerable His autobiography, first edited and illustrated by Dr. West of Stockbridge, (1805,) was afterwards supplemented (1830) by the Rev. John Ferguson, now lately deceased in a venerable age, who was in his early youth a member of the church under the pastorate of Hopkins ;-again, somewhat later, (1843,) by Dr. William Patten, who had been for seventeen years contemporary with him in the ministry at Newport;—and finally by Professor Park, in the exquisitely elaborate Memoir which he prefixed to the collected edition of Hopkins's works, issued by the Congregational Board of Publication. The pastors of the New England churches, and as many as are interested in the history of theological speculation, have it in their power to know, if they will, who Dr. Hopkins was, when he lived, and where, and what he was in all his individuality. But of all this the multitude of readers will know nothing save what Mrs. Stowe has been pleased to

tell them. To the multitude, the material facts in the life, history, and character of Dr. Hopkins, will be just those which are set down in the Minister's Wooing. It is a fair question, then, whether that which in this volume purports to be the history and portraiture of Hopkins, is consistent with historic facts?

By the multitude of readers it will be regarded as veritable history, or, at least, as not inconsistent with veritable history, that Hopkins lived a bachelor, with almost no thought of marriage, till he had passed the noon of life; and that then, as he was beginning to be an elderly man, he fell in love with his landlady's daughter, full twenty years younger than himself, and, having obtained her consent, was at last disappointed by the return of a younger, handsomer, and to a girl's fancy every way more interesting lover, who had been supposed to be dead. But the historic fact is that at the date of this story, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the venerable theologian of Newport, "Old Sincerity," (for that was the sobriquet by which he was familiarly known among his townsmen,) had been married more than forty years. He had been the father of eight children and the grandfather of perhaps twenty. It is true that, while he was yet a young man, he was twice disappointed in affection. The first time, he appears to have been simply jilted; or, as Dr. Park tells us, "a matrimonial engagement which he had formed at Northampton, was broken off in a way honorable but afflictive to himself." The second time, not long after his settlement as pastor at Great Barrington, Mass., "he paid his addresses," says Dr. Patten, as quoted by Professor Park, "to a young woman interesting in her appearance and manners, and of a bright intellect, who was rather a belle in the place," that place being his own parish. "She favored his suit, and so far as appeared, there was a mutual attachment, and the time of their marriage was not far distant. But a former lover, who had been absent some time, returned, with the design of renewing his attentions, and, by indirect or explicit manifestations of it, excited in her the expectation of an offer to be his wife. These intimations engaged her affection; and when

he made known to her his disappointment and his desire, she frankly disclosed the truth to Mr. Hopkins, and assured him that however much she respected and esteemed him, she could not fulfill her engagement to him from the heart.' This, he said, was a trial, a very great trial, but as she had not designed to deceive him in the encouragement she had given him, he could part with her in friendship." In this incident of the good man's youthful days (for after both his disappointments, he was happily married to Joanna Ingersoll, one of his own parishioners, when he had not yet passed three months beyond his twenty-sixth birth-day) we have the whole groundplan, as it were, of the Minister's Wooing. But Mrs. Stowe has seen fit to transfer this incident, not only from a rude frontier settlement among the mountains of Berkshire to the more fashionable society of what had lately been the second city in New England-but from the youth of Hopkins to a time when the shadow on the dial had already begun to tell him that the evening was at hand. In order to this she has been under the necessity of imputing to him the eccentricity (happily rare among New England pastors) of living almost to old age without the dignity of having a home and household of his own, and without any of those domestic ties which are so strong a bond of sympathy between a pastor and the families of his flock. And not only so, but she has been constrained to put him in a position which seems to us quite inconsistent with the gravity and dignity of his character as he stands in history. It is an awkward thing, no doubt, for a young man to be disappointed in an engagement of marriage, and particularly so when the young woman who had won his affection, and who thought she loved him, has made the discovery that her heart is given irrevocably to another; but the awkwardness is much greater when a grave and studious divine, on the shady side of forty, having never before had any but the remotest thought of matrimony, falls in love with a pretty girl of half his years, and having obtained her consent to become the minister's wife, loses her at the last moment because an earlier but younger lover, and a much more suitable match for her, steps in and carries off the prize. Νο