purposes, but cold and naked, and wholly destitute of the mimic charm
produced by landscape-painting. These defects are partly remediable,
and even without an absolute violation of literal truth, although by
methods rightfully interdicted to professors of biographical exactness.
A license must be assumed in brightening the materials which time has
rusted, and in tracing out half-obliterated inscriptions on the columns
of antiquity: Fancy must throw her reviving light on the faded incidents
that indicate character, whence a ray will be reflected, more or less
vividly, on the person to be described. The portrait of the ancient
governor whose name stands at the head of this article will owe any
interest it may possess, not to his internal self, but to certain
peculiarities of his fortune. These must be briefly noticed.

The birth and early life of Sir William Phips were rather an
extraordinary prelude to his subsequent distinction. He was one of
the twenty-six children of a gunsmith, who exercised his trade--where
hunting and war must have given it a full encouragement--in a small
frontier settlement near the mouth of the river Kennebec. Within the
boundaries of the Puritan provinces, and wherever those governments
extended an effectual sway, no depth nor solitude of the wilderness
could exclude youth from all the common opportunities of moral, and far
more than common ones of religious education. Each settlement of the
Pilgrims was a little piece of the Old World inserted into the New. It
was like Gideon's fleece, unwet with dew: the desert wind that breathed
over it left none of its wild influences there. But the first settlers
of Maine and New Hampshire were led thither entirely by carnal motives:
their governments were feeble, uncertain, sometimes nominally annexed to
their sister colonies, and sometimes asserting a troubled independence.
Their rulers might be deemed, in more than one instance, lawless
adventurers, who found that security in the forest which they had