English mayor. For the original contributors were, in the majority of cases, either descendants of John Cotton, or husbands of wives so descended. To the former class belonged John Eliot Thayer, who gave $250; Edward, Gorham, Sidney and Peter C. Brooks, who gave $100 each, and John Chipman Gray, who gave $50. Among the husbands of Cotton's women descendants who contributed were Charles Francis Adams, Edward Everett and Langdon Frothingham, each of whom gave $100. Other well-known names on the list of donors are Nathan and William Appleton, George Bancroft, Martin Brimmer, Abbott Lawrence, John Amory Lowell, Jonathan Phillips, Jared Sparks, Frederic Tudor and John Collins Warren.

The good feeling between the two Bostons, which was cemented by these generous gifts toward the Cotton Chapel, seems to date from the reopening of the church, two years earlier, for which occasion several gentlemen from our Boston were invited to England, at least four of whom were able to be present.

In our public library may be found a curious little sheet which gives an account of the exercises. In print so poor and so small as to nearly ruin the eyes are there recorded the

speeches of the day. One of these, made by Col. T. B. Lawrence of this city, expresses regret that "the domestic institutions of the states of the south" were being warmly debated in the English drawing-rooms of that time. Happily, Cotton's Boston descendants did not all think alike on this important subject!

V

SIR HARRY VANE- PROPHET AND MARTYR

THOMAS DUDLEY, whom Cotton's zeal had caused to be chosen as Winthrop's successor, was himself left out of the governorship at the election of May, 1635, and John Haynes elected in his stead. Then there arrived in Boston two men of very different character both of whom, however, were destined to make a deep mark in the history of their time and eventually to die on the scaffold for allegiance to the truth as they saw it. These two men were Hugh Peters and Sir Harry Vane. Peters had been the pastor of the English church in Rotterdam and had there been persecuted by the English ambassador. Vane was heir to Sir Harry Vane, Comptroller of the king's household, a man of great importance in the politics of the time. And his son has a personality of so much interest that I am resolved to trace his life fom its bright beginning to its glorious end even if, in so

doing, I run somewhat ahead of my narrative and carry my readers far away from Boston in New England. The fact is that one usually encounters only the Massachusetts segment of Vane's wonderful life and so is deprived of opportunity to judge his career in its wholeness and to realize that he, more than any other man, is the "link that binds together the severed divisions of the English-speaking race.'

One American writer, Charles Wentworth Upham, has pointed out in the preface to his really capital "Life of Sir Harry Vane," that there is an interesting parallel between the career of this hero and that of Lafayette. Both were scions of an aristocratic house and might easily have passed their youth following the pleasures of court life and indulging in those enervating relaxations commonly associated with young aristocrats. Instead, however, both yearned towards America, Lafayette because he saw in the new land a chance to realize the vision of political freedom which illumined his young soul, Harry Vane because he thought to find here "freedom to worship God." Both paid dearly in youth and in middle life for their devotion to an ideal, and Vane finally suffered death upon

the block. But because of them American history contains at least two highly romantic chapters and is more deeply inspiring than it could ever have been without them. For each served in his own era to point the truth that the only really great man is he who, with never a thought of self, unswervingly "follows the gleam" even when it leads to exile, prison and death.

Sir Harry Vane was born in 1612, one of a very numerous family of children. His father had been knighted by James I and though only in the early twenties at the time of the younger Harry's birth, was already on the way to eminence in the government of England. At the preparatory school in Westminster and while at Magdalen College in Oxford young Vane bade fair to follow a similar career along the line of least resistance. He was gay, addicted to pleasure and, as he himself says, fond of "good fellowship." But when he was about seventeen he began to interest himself in theology and, the fascination of this subject growing rapidly upon him, he pursued it further and further, at the same time alienating himself as a natural result from the form of worship and doctrine established by law. When the period of his matriculation arrived