likewise placed in his keeping, with orders to wear it around his neck
until they should appear before the Queen. To a youth of ease and
affluence, familiar with ambassadors and statesmen and not unknown at
courts, had succeeded a mature age of obscurity, deep study, and poverty.
No human creature would have heard of him had his career ended with his
official life. Two centuries and a half have passed away and the name of
the outlawed Puritan of Scrooby and Leyden is still familiar to millions
of the English race.

All these Englishmen were not poor. Many of them occupied houses of fair
value, and were admitted to the freedom of the city. The pastor with
three of his congregation lived in a comfortable mansion, which they had
purchased for the considerable sum of 8000 florins, and on the garden of
which they subsequently erected twenty-one lesser tenements for the use
of the poorer brethren.

Mr. Robinson was himself chosen a member of the famous university and
admitted to its privileges. During his long residence in Leyden, besides
the daily care of his congregation, spiritual and temporal, he wrote many
learned works.

Thus the little community, which grew gradually larger by emigration from
England, passed many years of tranquillity. Their footsteps were not
dogged by constables and pursuivants, they were not dragged daily before
the magistrates, they were not thrown into the town jails, they were not
hunted from place to place with bows and bills and mounted musketeers.
They gave offence to none, and were respected by all. "Such was their
singleheartedness and sincere affection one towards another," says their
historian and magistrate, "that they came as near the primitive pattern
of the first churches as any other church of these later times has done,