FOREWORD

In my student days colonial history never interested me. I did not then understand why but I am now perfectly certain that it was because persons and events were discussed, in most of the books set before me, only as their careers touched New England and hence in so fragmentary a way as to make them appear mere puppets with tiresome dates attached. The treatment usually accorded Sir Harry Vane offers an excellent example of what I mean. He flashed before us, in the history books, as a brilliant, handsome youth who espoused the cause of Mrs. Hutchinson, and then disappeared for ever from view. Because his wonderful career in England was deemed to have nothing to do with the subsequent history of Massachusetts we were deprived of the great privilege it would have been to make his inspiring life-story a part of our mental equipment! If this volume errs in the other extreme

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