When, in 1624, parliament was again convened, the commons resolved that English fishermen should have fishing with all its incidents. "Your patent," thus Gorges was addressed by Coke from the speaker's chair, “contains many particulars contrary to the laws and privileges of the subject; it is a monopoly, and the ends of private gain are concealed under color of planting a colony." "Shall none," asked the veteran lawyer in debate, "shall none visit the sea-coast for fishing? This is to make a monopoly upon the seas, which wont to be free. If you alone are to pack and dry fish, you attempt a monopoly of the wind and the sun." It was in vain. for Sir George Calvert to resist; the bill for free fishing was adopted, but it never received the royal assent.

The determined opposition of the house, though it could not move the king to overthrow the corporation, paralyzed its enterprise; and the cottages, which, within a few years, rose along the coast from Cape Cod to the bay of Fundy, were the results of private adventure.

Gorges, the most energetic member of the council of Plymouth, had not allowed repeated ill success to chill his confidence and decision; and he found in John Mason, "who had been governor of a plantation in Newfoundland, a man of action," like himself. It was not difficult for Mason, who had been elected an associate and secretary of the council, to obtain, in March, 1621, a grant of the lands between Salem river and the farthest head of the Merrimack; but he did no more with it than name it Mariana. In August, 1622, Gorges and Mason took a patent for Laconia, the country between the sea, the St. Lawrence, the Merrimack, and the Kennebec; a company of English merchants was formed, and under its auspices, in 1623, permanent plantations were established on the banks of the Piscataqua. Portsmouth and Dover are among the oldest towns in New England. In the same year an attempt was made by Christopher Lovett to colonize the county and city of York, for which, at a later day, collections were ordered to be taken up in all the churches of England.

When the country on Massachusetts bay was granted to a company, of which the zeal and success were soon to overshadow all the efforts of proprietaries and merchants, Mason

VOL. 1.-16

procured a new patent; and, in November, 1629, he received a fresh title to the territory between the Merrimack and Piscataqua, in terms which in some degree interfered with the pretensions of his neighbors on the south. This was the patent for New Hampshire, and was pregnant with nothing so signally as suits at law. The region had been devastated by the mutual wars of the tribes and the same wasting pestilence which left New Plymouth a desert; no notice seems to have been taken of the rights of the natives, nor did they now issue any deed of their lands; but the soil in the immediate vicinity of Dover, and afterward of Portsmouth, was conveyed to the planters themselves, or to those at whose expense the settlement had been made. A favorable impulse was thus given to the little colonies; and houses began to be built on the "Strawberry Bank" of the Piscataqua. But the progress of the town was slow; Josselyn, in 1638, described the coast as a wilderness, with here and there a few huts scattered by the sea-side. Thirty years after its settlement, Portsmouth contained "between fifty and sixty families."

When, in 1635, the charter of the council of Plymouth was about to be revoked, Mason extended his pretensions to the Salem river, the southern boundary of his first territory, and obtained of the expiring corporation a corresponding patent. But he died before the king confirmed his grant, and his family avoided further expense by leaving the few inhabitants of New Hampshire to take care of themselves.

The designs of Sir Ferdinando Gorges were continued without great success. His first act with reference to the territory of the present state of Maine was to invite the Scottish nation to become the guardians of its frontier. Sir William Alexander, the ambitious writer of turgid rhyming tragedies, a man of influence with King James, and desirous of engaging in colonial adventure, seconded the design; and, in September, 1621, he obtained without difficulty a patent for the territory east of the river St. Croix and south of the St. Lawrence. The region, which had already been included in the provinces of Acadia and New France, was named Nova Scotia. Thus were the seeds of future wars scattered broadcast; for James gave away lands which already, and with a better title

on the ground of discovery, had been granted by Henry IV. of France, and occupied by his subjects. Twice attempts were made to effect a Scottish settlement; but, notwithstanding a brilliant eulogy of the soil, climate, and productions of Nova Scotia, they were fruitless.

It may be left to English historians to relate how much their country suffered from the childish ambition of King James to marry the prince of Wales to the daughter of the king of Spain. In the rash and unsuccessful visit of Prince Charles and Buckingham to Madrid, the former learned to cherish the fine arts, and to rivet his belief that the king of England was rightfully as absolute as the monarchs of France and Spain; the latter received accounts of abundance of gold in the valley of the Amazon, and, after his return, obtained a grant of the territory on that river, with the promise of aid in his enterprise from the king of Sweden.

After the death of James, the marriage of Charles I. with Henrietta Maria promised between the rival claimants of the wilds of Acadia a peaceful adjustment of jarring pretensions. Yet, even at that period, the claims of France were not recognised by England; and, in July, 1625, a new patent confirmed to Sir William Alexander all the prerogatives which had been lavished on him, with the right of creating an order of baronets. The sale of titles proved to the poet a lucrative traffic; the project of a colony was abandoned.

The self-willed, feeble monarch of England, having twice abruptly dissolved parliament, and having vainly resorted to illegal modes of taxation, found himself destitute of money and of credit, and yet engaged in a war with Spain. At such a moment, in 1627, Buckingham, eager to thwart Richelieu, hurried England into a needless and disastrous conflict with France.

Hostilities were nowhere successfully attempted, except in America. In 1628, Port Royal fell easily into the hands of the English; the conquest was no more than the acquisition of a small trading station. Sir David Kirk and his two brothers, Louis and Thomas, were commissioned to ascend the St. Lawrence, and Quebec received a summons to surrender. The garrison, destitute alike of provisions and of military stores, had no hope but in the character of Champlain, its com

mander; his answer of proud defiance concealed his weakness, and the intimidated assailants withdrew. But Richelieu sent no seasonable supplies; the garrison was reduced to extreme suffering and the verge of famine; and when, in 1629, the squadron of Kirk reappeared before the town, Quebec capitulated. That is to say, England gained possession of a few wretched hovels, tenanted by a hundred famished men, and a fortress of which the English admiral could not but admire the position. Not a port in North America remained to the French; from Long Island to the pole, England had no rival. But, before the conquest of Canada was achieved, peace had been proclaimed; and, as an article in the treaty promised the restitution of all acquisitions made subsequent to April 14, 1629, Richelieu recovered not Quebec and Canada only, but Cape Breton and the undefined Acadia.

From the scanty memorials which the earliest settlers of the coast east of New Hampshire have left, it is perhaps not possible to ascertain precisely when the fishing stages of a summer began to be transformed into permanent establishments. In 1626, the first settlement was probably made "on the Maine," a few miles from Monhegan, at the mouth of the Pemaquid.

Hardly had the settlement, which claimed the distinction of being the oldest on that coast, gained a permanent existence, before a succession of patents distributed the territory from the Piscataqua to the Penobscot among various proprietors. The grants issued from 1629 to 1631 were couched in vague language, and were made in hasty succession, without deliberation on the part of the council of Plymouth, and without any firm purpose of establishing colonies by those to whom they were issued. In consequence, as the neighborhood of the French foreboded border feuds, so uncertainty about land titles and boundaries threatened perpetual lawsuits. At the same time enterprise was wasted by its diffusion over too wide a surface. Every harbor along the sea was accessible, and groups of cabins were scattered at wide intervals, without any point of union. Agriculture was hardly attempted. The musket and the hook and line were more productive than the implements of husbandry. The farmers who came to occupy a district of forty miles square, named

Lygonia, and stretching from Harpswell to the Kennebec, soon sought a home among the rising settlements of Massachusetts. Except for peltry and fish, the coast of Maine would not at that time have been tenanted by Englishmen.

Yet, from pride of character, Gorges clung to the project of territorial aggrandizement. When, in February, 1635, Mason limited himself to the country west of the Piscataqua, while Sir William Alexander obtained of the Plymouth company a patent for the country between the St. Croix and the Kennebec, Gorges succeeded in soliciting the district that remained between the Kennebec and New Hampshire, and was named governor-general of New England. Without delay he sent his nephew, William Gorges, to govern his territory. Saco may have contained one hundred and fifty inhabitants when, in 1636, the first court ever duly organized on the soil of Maine was held within its limits. Before that time there may have been voluntary combinations of the settlers themselves; but there had existed on the Kennebec no power to prevent or to punish bloodshed. William Gorges remained in the country less than two years. Six Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut, who, in 1637, received a commission to act as his successors, declined the trust, and for two years no records of the infant settlements then called New Somersetshire can be found. In April, 1639, a royal charter constituted Gorges the lord proprietary of the country, for which the old soldier, who had never seen America, immediately aspired to establish boroughs, frame schemes of colonial government, and enact a code of laws.

The region which lies but a little nearer the sun was already converted, by the energy of religious zeal, into a busy, well-organized, and even opulent state. The early history of Massachusetts is the history of a class of men as remarkable for their qualities and influence as any by which the human race has been diversified.

The settlement near Weymouth was kept up; a plantation was begun near Mount Wollaston, within the present limits of Quincy; and the merchants of the west continued their voyages to New England for fish and furs. But these things were of feeble moment, compared with the attempt at