NOVEMBER MEETING, 1894.

THE stated meeting was held on Thursday, the 8th instant, at three o'clock, P. M.; the President, Dr. GEORGE E. ELLIS, in the chair.

After the transaction of the usual preliminary business, the PRESIDENT said:

Two years and a half ago, at a meeting of this Society, warm eulogistic tributes were paid by our associates Dr. Everett and Professor Goodwin to that eminent historian, then recently deceased, Dr. Edward A. Freeman, who had been for nearly twenty years on our roll as an Honorary Member. We have now to record the loss from the same roll of that versatile and brilliant writer, Dr. James Anthony Froude, who had preceded Dr. Freeman upon it. They represented two very different schools of historians, even to the extent of sharp antagonism in their respective conceptions and methods in research and narration. But none the less Froude succeeded his junior critic in the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford. His life closed while he was discharging that office, his last service in it being the delivery of those lectures on the "Life and Letters of Erasmus," recently published, which some of us find very fascinating in the reading.

The older of our members will recall the social meeting of the Society which was held at the home of our associate Hon. John Amory Lowell, in November, 1872, three days after that overwhelming calamity to our city by the greatest conflagration ever visited upon it, though the meeting had been called prior to the devastating catastrophe, and it might have been that the members would not have the heart to attend it. It was held, and proved to be very interesting. Its chief attraction was the promised presence of Mr. Froude, then visiting the country. He came to the meeting after the delivery of one of his course of lectures at the Tremont Temple, and addressed us, after a graceful introduction to us by our President, Mr. Winthrop.

Mr. JUSTIN WINSOR then read the following paper:

The Earliest Printed Sources of New England History. 1602-1629.

I make a survey of the contemporary printed sources of New England history, from the coming of Gosnold to the landing of Endicott (1602-1629), with a view to ascertain the comparative rarity of these historic records, and to gauge the effect of that rarity upon collectors competing for such books.

If we look then, in the first place, to what is left to us in contemporary print about the earliest visits of the English for we are not concerned with those of the French and Dutch to our New England coast, we find, beside many voyagers of whom we have only manuscript or later accounts, but three explorers during the first twelve years of our period the narratives of whose experiences were put in print at the time; and these are Gosnold, Waymouth, and John Smith. We will consider them in order.

There were two impressions in 1602 of John Brereton's "Briefe and True Relation" of the voyage of Gosnold, who spent a season on Cuttyhunk, and gave a name to our seaward cape. Three copies of the first impression are believed to be extant. One of these was sold in 1888 at Lord Harwicke's sale in London, bound with eleven other tracts in one volume, for £555, and came to the Carter-Brown Library.

Some seventeen years ago I had my attention drawn to a beautiful, crisp copy of this little, thin quarto, while on a visit to Lamport Hall, an old mansion of James the First's time in Northamptonshire. A few years before this its old library had thrown new light upon Shakespearean bibliography; and I was pleased to find that the baronet who founded the library in that king's time had not only been in the habit of bringing down from London such fresh little plays and poems of the Shakespearean era as pleased him, but that he occasionally put in his bag the bright though now dusky little quartos which told of adventures on the American shores. In 1886 Sir Charles Isham, the present owner of the estate, after some correspondence with me as to its value, put this little tract into an auction sale in London, intending to "protect" it at £125. Some years before, in 1878, a copy of this tract in the Brinley sale joined to another of equal rarity

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had brought, for each one, $800,- not quite so much perhaps as had been sanguinely hoped for, and Mr. Charles H. Kalbfleisch was the purchaser. Quaritch, however, paid £265 for the Isham copy, and sold it to Mr. Kalbfleisch, to replace the Brinley copy, which being less fine he in turn sold to Dodd, Mead & Company, from whom it passed to Mr. E. D. Church, of Greenpoint, N. Y.

The second impression contains twenty-four additional pages of "Inducements"; and a copy of this sort is in Harvard College Library, and another, bought at the Barlow sale (No. 332) in 1890 for $1125, is in the Lenox Library. There are three copies in the British Museum, one of which the Grenville copy lacks the supplementary part, and not more than three or four others in existence, so far as known. long since a copy brought £210 in London; and we may accordingly place a pecuniary value of not far from a thousand dollars upon the earliest English publication touching the history of our New England coast.

Not

The next publication in the order of date is the "True Relation" of James Rosier, London, 1605, referring to Waymouth's voyage on the Maine coast, and the beginning of English interest in that region. It is quite as rare as the Brereton tract, and has raised even more rivalry among collectors. It was so difficult of access in Sparks's day that he caused a manuscript copy to be made of one in the Grenville Collection in the British Museum, which that library had acquired at a cost of nine guineas as far back as the Inglis sale. In 1883 a copy was sold in the collection, which had been originally formed by Sir Francis Drake; and Quaritch became its purchaser at £301, and sold it later to Mr. Kalbfleisch for £335, from whom it passed to Dodd, Mead & Company, who in turn sold it to Mr. E. D. Church. Mr. Kalbfleisch had also bought the copy which was the companion volume to the Brereton of the Brinley sale, not knowing that the last page was in facsimile, and this copy is now in the Carter-Brown Library at Providence. Mr. Kalbfleisch possessed at one time a third copy, and one was sold in the Barlow sale in 1890 (No. 2158) for $1825, when the Lenox Library bought it. The only other copy accessible in a public collection is in the library of the New York Historical Society, which came to that institution with the Francis L. Hawks Collection.

When John Smith coursed along our coast in 1614, and made the observations which led to the earliest fairly accurate map of Massachusetts Bay, he was preparing for the publication of his "Description of New England" in 1616. By this time the permanent occupation of our shores under the familiar name that connects us with the mother country was pretty well assured. Smith's printed record, even in the days of Obadiah Rich, when that gentleman began purveying to the wants of American collectors, fifty and sixty years ago, had unusual pecuniary value for such tracts, for his lists show such prices as £1-10-0 and the like. The "Description has in our day run up in value in London to £50 and £60; and Quaritch two or three years ago, when he made a venture to this country of some of his American rarities, priced a copy at $300. Good "working" copies with leaves occasionally defective or with the map in facsimile, have usually brought from £10 to £30 of late years. In this country thirty-five years ago the Edward A. Crowninshield copy brought $162.50; and as such matters go, the appreciation was very moderate when the Ives copy in 1891 brought $192.50. Copies more or less approaching a recognized standard of excellence have been sold in the Barlow (No. 2294), Cooke (No. 2304), and Brinley (two copies, Nos. 359, 360) sales. There are copies in the Charles Deane and Carter-Brown collections. The accessible copies in public collections in this country, so far as I know, are in the Harvard College Library, that of Congress, the Boston Public Library (two, one the Barlow, and the other the Prince copy), and the Lenox Library. The Force copy (Library of Congress) and the Prince copy are the only ones which have the list of names as proposed by Prince Charles for our coast landmarks. There are three copies in the British Museum.

While the Pilgrims were preparing for their Atlantic voyage, Smith had prepared and in 1620 published the first edition of his record of commercial ventures on the New England coast, conducted, as he says, "in 26 ships within these sixe yeares." He entitled it " New Englands Trials," meaning by that word "ventures." It is one of the rarest of Smith's books. There are copies in the Bodleian and in the British Museum; and when Mr. Deane visited the former library in 1866, it was one of the first books which he asked to see, for

there was at that time, as he thought, not a copy in the United States. The lapse of nearly thirty years has not, I fear, made the statement less true to-day; and but for the reprint of it which Mr. Deane made in 1873, few American scholars could know its text. When Mr. John Carter Brown reprinted in 1867 the second edition of 1622, that gentleman had never seen the first edition, and Force had followed the second. edition in his reprint. Despite an edition of two or three thousand copies, which Smith says that he printed for distribution to create an interest in this distant region, not a copy apparently is now to be found among us. The second edition of 1622 is only less rare; for though such collectors as Mr. Deane, Mr. John Carter Brown, and Mr. George Brinley (No. 363) succeeded in finding copies, such other ardent seekers as William Menzies, Henry C. Murphy, S. L. M. Barlow, and Brayton Ives were never able to gratify their hopes in this respect. The Brinley copy is now in the Lenox Library. In this second edition (1622) Smith altered the record of service on the New England coast so as to include "80 ships in eight yeares," and he had the further opportunity of giving some account of the little settlement at Plymouth," begun," as he says, "by sixty weake men," printing at the same time one of the earliest narratives of the experiences of the Pilgrims in a letter, dated December, 1621, written by William Hilton, and supplementing the story as told by Mourt. The type of the second edition was probably kept standing for a while, since copies in the British Museum and the Bodleian show changes to be accounted for in that way.

We have in this same year (1622) an important authoritative statement of the earliest phases of our New England history, in the "Briefe Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England," an official publication of the Council for New England, which covers the period from 1607 to 1622. This little London tract is extremely rare. There are two copies in Mr. Deane's collection, one in the Carter-Brown and another in the Lenox Library, and two in the British Museum, and I know not where to look for others.

Two other publications of the same year (1622) pertain to the Pilgrim story. One is the sermon preached by Elder Cushman at Plymouth, December 9, 1621, and printed in