reward his progress through musty chronicles, to find himself
suddenly arrested in his narrative by some of those rude interruptions
by which violence and injustice disfigure so frequently,
in the march of history, the beauty of its portraits. One of these
occurs to us in this connection. Our Huguenot settlers on the Santee
were not long suffered to pursue a career of unbroken prosperity.
The very fact that they prospered -- that, in the language of Mr. Lawson,
"they outstript our English," when placed in like circumstances --
that they were no longer desolate and dependent, and had grown vigorous,
and perhaps wanton, in the smiles of fortune -- was quite enough
to re-awaken in the bosoms of "our English" the ancient national grudge
upon which they had so often fed before. The prejudices and hostilities
which had prevailed for centuries between their respective nations,
constituted no small part of the moral stock which the latter had brought
with them into the wilderness. This feeling was farther heightened,
at least maintained, by the fact that France and England
had contrived to continue their old warfare in the New World;
and, while French emissaries were busy in the back parts of the colony,
stimulating the Creeks and Cherokees to hostility, it was perhaps
natural enough that the English, whose frontiers were continually ravaged
in consequence, should find it easy to confound the "parley-vous",
their enemies, with those, their neighbors, who spoke the same
unpopular language. It is not improbable, on the other hand,
that the Huguenot settlers were a little too exclusive,
a little too tenacious of their peculiar habits, manners, and language.
They did not suffer themselves to assimilate with their neighbors;
but, maintaining the policy by which they had colonized in a body,
had been a little too anxious to preserve themselves
as a singular and separate people. In this respect they were not unlike
the English puritans, in whom and their descendants,