Page:What cheer, or, Roger Williams in banishment (1896).pdf/225

 *quired his expulsion. He was the author of the following lines:

"Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison all with heresy and vice. If men be left and otherwise combine, My epitaph's I dy'd no libertine."

Yet we ought, perhaps, to blame the system, rather than the magistrate whose duty it was to carry it into effect.

STANZA XLVII.

God gave James Stuart this, and James gave us.

The patents of the companies which settled in this country granted them lands without any reference to the rights of the natives. But the companies never availed themselves of these grants to that extent. Whatever may have been their opinions, they acted under them as if they had only invested them with the right of pre-emption. Cotton Mather is the only historian, that I recollect, who makes a merit of paying the Indians for their lands, and of not expelling them immediately from the soil in virtue of these patents.

CANTO NINTH.

STANZA III.

''Early that morn, beside the tranquil flood, Where, ready trimmed, rode Waban's frail canoe, The banished man, his spouse and children stood, And bade their lately blooming hopes adieu.''

I have represented Williams, throughout this narrative, as unaccompanied by any of his Salem friends. And such, I think, was the fact up to the time he left, or was about leaving, Seekonk. Indeed, there was no necessity for any of his friends to accompany him in his flight from Salem "in the winter's snow," They could render him no assistance in negotiations with the Indians.—They could not alleviate his hardships by participat