as long as Peter Hobart's. Sewall's record "that he was for that way which was purely Independent" implies, in its relation to the qualities to be transmitted to his descendants, something more than a passing theological distinction.

John Norton's descendants1 continued to live in the little town of Hingham; and there, on December 31, 1786, Andrews Norton was born. His boyhood and youth were unmarked by incident worth recording; life in those days in a village like Hingham led to quiet ways and studious habits in one inclined to them; and in 1800, while still but a boy, he entered Harvard College, where four years later he graduated. As the years passed on, the grave youth with intellectual tastes gave himself more and more to the pursuits of the scholar. In 1811, he became a Tutor in the College; from 1813 to 1819, he held the Dexter Lectureship on Biblical Criticism; from 1819 to 1830, the Dexter Professorship of Sacred Literature. From 1813 to 1821, he served also as Librarian to the College. In 1821, on the 21st of May, he was happily married to Catharine Eliot, born September 7, 1793, the daughter of Samuel Eliot, of Boston.

course, mainly directed against the prevailing unbelief. 'Our degeneracy,' said the preacher, 'is too palpable to be denied, too gross to be excused.' "The longer Judgment is delayed, the heavier it will be when it cometh. It shall come; it hath sometime Leaden feet, but Iron Hands.'

"Two years afterward, March 26, 1710, Judge Sewall 'went to Hingham to Meeting, heard Mr. Norton from Psal. 145. 18. Setting forth the Propitiousness of God. In the afternoon Lydia Cushing & Paul Lewis were baptised. Din'd with Major Thaxter, Sup'd with Mr. Norton, Mrs. Norton, & their sister Shepard."" (Norton's footnote.)

1 His daughter Elizabeth married John Quincy, from whom John Quincy Adams was descended.

1

After a few months spent in Boston, Andrews Norton and his wife decided to settle themselves in the country; and in order to be near his work at Harvard, they bought the house and some fifty surrounding acres in Cambridge, known as "Shady Hill." The long avenue led to Kirkland Street, not far from the College Yard and the old central buildings of the University; the house, built ten or fifteen years before the Nortons acquired it, they altered and enlarged; and there, during the next thirteen years, their six children were born.

Peaceful and fortunate years they were, except for the death of two children in 1833 and 1834, — first, William, a promising boy of three, and the following year, a little girl but a few weeks old. The other four children-Louisa, born in 1823, Jane, in 1824, Charles Eliot, in 1827 (November 16), and Grace, in 1834 grew up happy and confident in the devotion of both father and mother, amid easy circumstances, in the sheltered and simple atmosphere of the period.

There was but one important break in the routine of a teacher's life, when in 1828 Andrews Norton with his wife and his son Charles, not yet a year old, made a six months' journey to England and Scotland. Letters to his father, Samuel Norton, describe meetings with Mrs. Hemans, the publication of whose poems in America under his superintendence had led to a warm personal friendship; with Crabbe, Joanna Baillie, Southey, and Wordsworth, who gave him a letter of introduction to Sir Walter Scott. Linking the past with our own day, there is a pleasant tradition of the visit to Wordsworth,

that the poet took the little Charles Norton on his knee and tenderly gave him his blessing.

It was a time when American visitors to England were objects of curiosity. When Andrews Norton, his wife, and a cousin of hers were dining one day with the Bishop of St. Asaph (Bishop Luxmoore), they were told that the Bishop's old housekeeper had been informed to quote from one of Andrews Norton's letters to his father—"that an American gentleman and two American ladies were expected, and that she was quite curious about us, and wanted to know whether we were white or not. As we were going downstairs, she opened a door to look at us, and the Bishop, who was waiting on Catharine, good-humoredly turned her half round, that the housekeeper, as he afterwards said, might have a fair view." In 1829 the Nortons returned to Cambridge, and Shady Hill.

The epoch was not one of change or intellectual groping; the general content, the incorruptible simplicities, the intelligent provincialism of the community were the expression and result of the still homogeneous character of America at that time, before the vast influx of immigrants from Ireland and continental Europe had wrought the vital alterations that have been made in the social fabric of the country and in the functions of Democracy itself. It was natural that under such conditions race qualities should be strongly developed, that the individual should be what his fathers had been. John Norton lived in his descendant Charles Norton growing up in Cambridge in the years 1830 to 1845. The strong moral purpose, the concern