His first volume seems to have been written under a consciousness that his subject was provincial, and even of a local interest altogether circumscribed. In the second volume, one perceives a more cheery and confident tone, due, probably, to the prompt recognition which his labours had then received not only in Massachusetts but in England. In the third volume are to be observed signs of increasing ease in composition, a more flowing and copious style, not a few felicities of expression. That, in all these volumes, he intended to tell the truth, and to practise fairness, is also plain; to say that he did not entirely succeed, is to say that he was human. Of course, the supreme test of historical fairness was reached when he came to the writing of his third volume,--which was, in fact, the history not only of his contemporaries but of himself, and of himself in deep and angry disagreement with many of them. It is much to his praise to say that, throughout this third volume, the prevailing tone is calm, moderate, just, with only occasional efforts at pleading his own cause, with only occasional flickers of personal or political enmity. But no one should approach the reading of Hutchinson’s _History of Massachusetts Bay_ with the expectation of finding in it either brilliant writing or an entertaining story. From beginning to end, there are few passages that can be called even salient--but almost everywhere an even flow of statesmanlike narrative; severe in form; rather dull, probably, to all who have not the preparation of a previous interest in the matters discussed; but always pertinent, vigorous, and full of pith. Notwithstanding Hutchinson’s modest opinion of his own ability in the drawing of historical portraits, it is probable that in such portraits of distinguished characters, both among his contemporaries and among his predecessors, the general reader will be likely to find himself the most interested.
_Samuel Peters._--Somewhere in the debatable land between history, fiction, and burlesque, there wanders a notorious book, first published anonymously in London in 1781, and entitled _A General History of Connecticut_. Though the authorship of this book was never acknowledged by the man who wrote it, there is no doubt that it was the work of Samuel Peters, an Anglican clergyman and a Loyalist, a man of commanding personal presence, uncommon intellectual resources, powerful will, and ill-balanced character. He opposed with frank and bitter aggressiveness the Revolutionary politics then rampant. He sailed for England in October, 1774. There he abode until his return to America in 1805. During the five or six years immediately following his arrival in England, he seems to have had congenial employment in composing his _General History of Connecticut_, as a means apparently of wreaking an undying vengeance upon the sober little commonwealth in which he was born and from which he had been ignominiously cast out. The result of this long labour of hate was a production, calling itself historical, which was characterised by a contemporary English journal--_The Monthly Review_--as having “so many marks of party spleen and idle credulity” as to be “altogether unworthy of the public attention.” In spite, however, of such censure both then and since then, this alleged _History_ has had, now for more than a hundred years, not only a vast amount of public attention, but very considerable success in a form that seems to have been dear to its author’s heart--that of spreading through the English-speaking world a multitude of ludicrous impressions to the dishonour of the people of whom it treats. It cannot be denied that for such a service it was most admirably framed; since its grotesque fabrications in disparagement of a community of Puritan dissenters seem to have proved a convenient quarry for ready-made calumnies upon that sort of people there and elsewhere.