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English tenacity in safeguarding his hold upon his own portion.
Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as “home.”
The lighter and the more serious writings of the colonists are alike in their respect for the past.
In the New England settlements, although not at first in Virginia, there was respect for learning and for an educated clergy.
The colonists revered the Bible.
They maintained a stubborn regard for the Common Law of England.
Even amid all the excitement of a successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law still held the Americans to the experience of the inescapable past.
Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of the books written in America during the seventeenth century, and tries to meditate upon the general difference between them and the English books written during the same period, he will be aware of the firmness with which the conservative forces held on this side of the Atlantic.
It was only one hundred years from the Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of James Second, the last of the Stuart Kings.
With that Revolution of 1688 the struggles characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came to an end. A new
New Haven. Yale University. Press. 1921.
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