London merchant of good estate. It is computed that there were in New
England during the first generation as many university graduates as in
any community of equal population in the old country. Almost the first
care of the settlers was to establish schools. Every town of fifty
families was required by law to maintain a common school, and every
town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school. In 1636, only
sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock,
Harvard College was founded at Newtown, whose name was thereupon
changed to Cambridge, the General Court held at Boston on September 8,
1630, having already advanced 400 pounds "by way of essay towards the
building of something to begin a college." "An university," says
Mather, "which hath been to these plantations, for the good literature
there cultivated, _sal Gentium_, . . . and a river without the streams
whereof these regions would have been mere unwatered places for the
devil." By 1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale
College at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Connecticut
plantations having increased sufficiently to need a college at their
own doors. A printing-press was set up at Cambridge in 1639, which was
under the oversight of the university authorities, and afterward of
licensers appointed by the civil power. The press was no more free in
Massachusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed
printing" for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his
_Areopagitica_, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New England until some
twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. "The
Freeman's Oath" and an almanac were issued from the Cambridge press in
1639, and in 1640 the first English book printed in America, a
collection of the psalms in meter, made by various ministers, and known
as the _Bay Psalm Book_. The poetry of this version was worse, if
possible, than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's famous rendering; but it
is noteworthy that one of the principal translators was that devoted