broke all bounds. Everywhere men who had
claimed the right to uphold opinions adverse
to those of the majority of their fellow citizens,
were driven forth with ignominy. We are
told to forgive our enemies, was the fierce cry
which rose on all sides, but we are not told to
forgive our friends. Mr. Curwen thought he
might possibly escape unmolested in Philadelphia;
but on arriving there, in his precipitate
flight from Boston, he found the
militia as eager to put shoulder to shoulder
in peaceful Pennsylvania, as he had left them
in puritan Massachusetts; drums were beating,
colours flying; and he saw two companies
of armed quakers, commanded by Friend
Samuel Marshall, and Friend Thomas Miffin,
parading the streets of the drab-coated city.
So there was nothing left for this poor ex-colonial
Judge of Admiralty, but to put himself
on board a schooner bound for England, and
try to find with us the liberty of opinion
which America was then too bent on seizing
for herself to have time to concede to her off-spring.
He was at sea nearly two months;
and long before he landed at Dover, in July,
the battle of Bunker's Hill had been fought,
and all hopes of peaceful accommodation
closed.

When Judge Curwen fled from the rebellious
colonies he was sixty years old, when he
went back to the triumphant young republic
he was sixty-nine; and of the eventful years
which formed the interval—all of them passed
in England, and all with the usual penalties
of exile, though some with more than its
usual enjoyments—he left a curious record in
a diary which his surviving representatives
printed in New York a dozen years ago,* and
in which those past days with all their pains
and pleasures, their hopes and their mis-givings,
still live for us with a vivid and
singular reality. For the record was honest
and genuine, as in the main the diarist
himself was. He does not appear, indeed, to
have been of the heroic stuff of martyrs. If
the liberty of opinion he craved had been conceded
to him, it would probably have involved
nothing graver than the liberty to change his
opinion; for he was clearly a man impressible
by events, and would probably have saved himself
a very long voyage, and very great
inconvenience, if he could only have held his tongue
till after the first few blows were struck in the
war of his fellow-citizens for independence.
Not that he was a time-server—far from that;
his views within his line of sight were steady
and unwavering; but in politics this line
stretched but a little way, and took also a
subsequent not dishonourable bias from his
avowed liking for his native land. In
other respects he was a man of fair learning,
and more than average accomplishment; not
at all intolerant of opinions at issue with his
own; in religion a dissenter of the class still
most prevalent in New England, in his tastes
scholarly and refined, not ill-read in general
literature, prone to social enjoyments, a
reasonably good critic of what he saw,—
altogether an excellent example of the class ot
men out of whom the Fathers and Founders
of that great republic sprang; and a
companion not less pleasant than instructive to
pass a few hours with, as I hope the reader
will find.
* It was printed in 1842 with the title of Journal and
Letters of the late Samuel Curwen, Judge of Admiralty, &c.:
an American refugee in England; under the Editorship of
Mr. George Atkinson Ward, "Member of the New York
Historical Society, and Honorary Member of the Massachusetts
Historical Society."

If he also finds, as he moves in such
company through some memorable scenes long
past, that on all sides views are entertained
of the probable results of this quarrel between
Great Britain and her Colonies, which at
the present day appear almost too monstrous
for belief, he will not be less kindly disposed
to the elderly New Englander who felt that
he could only resolve by headlong flight the
many awful doubts that were besetting him of
what must follow a contest so unnatural. With
its only practicable issue, Separation, staring
every one in the face at the period his diary
begins—no one is bold enough to confront it.
The idea is not more abhorrent to Lords North
and George Germaine than it is to Chatham
and to Burke. It will appear not less to the
credit of Mr. Curwen's sagacity than of his
humanity that he constantly urged conciliation,
because he held steadily to the belief
that America never would be conquered by
arms; but not for an instant, till the very
last, did he doubt that the downfall of both
countries would follow fast on the heels of what
was called "Independence." And all around
him, whether favourable or not to the claims
of the insurgent colonists, are not less firmly
of that opinion. It was not till Mr. Curwen
had been living more than two years in
England, that (on the night of the 3rd
September, 1777) he met one man at
Bristol who held quite different views. This
eccentric person will appear in our second
chapter.

But whatever errors in political science
might be prevalent did the great mass of
the people even on this side the Atlantic,
though much ill-blood had been violently
stirred, desire other than a speedy and
amicable close to this breaking out of
quarrel? Mr. Curwen tells us, no. The
experience of his first two months in London
sufficed to prove to him that though the
upper ranks, most of the capital stockholders,
and the principal nobility, were for forcing at
all hazards supremacy of Parliament over the
insurgent colonies, yet from the middle ranks
downward the people were decidedly opposed
to it. He went into all kinds of coffee-houses
(a better index of public opinion in those days
than the club-houses since have been), and
though he found the resistance of America
the standing topic of dispute, and the
dispute "something warm," yet it was always
"without abuse or ill-nature." Indeed in one