nearly two centuries ago. We know through them, and through them only, what manner of lives our forefathers led in Puritan New England, in comfortable Dutch New York, in demure Quaker Pennsylvania, before the sharp individuality of each colony was merged into the common tide, and with the birth of a nation—"a respectable nation," to use the words of Washington, who was averse to glittering superlatives—the old order passed away forever from the land.
"It is to the pages of Judge Sewall's diary," writes Alice Morse Earle, "that we must turn for any definite or extended contemporary picture of colonial life in New England;" just as we turn for the corresponding picture of old England to the diaries of John Evelyn and of Mr. Samuel Pepys. Mrs. Earle does not add, though she well might, that it is better discipline to read Judge Sewall's records than those of all the other diarists in Christendom; for, by contrast with the bleak cheerlessness of those godly days, our own age seems flooded with sunshine, and warm with the joy of life. And not our own age only. If we pass from
