among people of the middle class, and the better sort of this class, whose morals are always the best. Individuals and whole families disposed of their property, and thought they made excellent bargains in buying land at five shillings an acre. . . . About five hundred settlers, all of them mechanics, artists, or tradesmen in easy circumstances, and of good morals, arrived, in the course of 1791 and 1792, in the harbors of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore," and finally settled at Gallipolis, as before stated. In Howe's Collections, it is said that among the settlers "were not a few carvers and gilders to his Majesty, coach and peruke makers, friseurs, and other artistes, about equally well fitted for a backwoods life, with only ten or twelve farmers and laborers." An account of their troubles and sufferings may be read in Volney's work, before quoted. (See the English translation, London, 1804, pp. 355-366.)

On motion of Mr. WHITMORE, it was

Voted, That the Recording Secretary be instructed to report, at the next meeting of the Society, a list of all its committees now existing, with the date of their appointment, the names of the members, the duties assigned them, and the limit of their duration.

Dr. HEDGE presented to the Society, with some remarks upon it, a printed broadside, being the order of exercises at the Commencement at Harvard College for 1767. He thought no copy of this was in the college library.

The PRESIDENT then read portions of a copy of the speech of Sir Walter Raleigh on the scaffold, October 28, 1618, which he had found in the MS. Common-Place Book of his ancestor, Adam Winthrop, the father of the first Governor Winthrop, introducing them as follows:

It may be remembered that at our Stated Meeting in November last, when we had the pleasure of welcoming Mr. Froude to Boston, I alluded to a contemporaneous account of the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, which I had found in the Common-Place Book of Adam Winthrop, the father of the Governor of Massachusetts in 1630. I did not suppose that it contained any thing new in regard to that event, and I had many misgivings about offering it for publication. But no one was able to point to the same precise version of that sad story in print; and our Committee of Publication thought proper to include it in our last volume of Proceedings, where it has been read with interest, as I have reason to know, both at home and abroad.

In the same old manuscript Note-book, I have found several other accounts of historical events of a somewhat similar character, carefully copied out from seemingly authentic sources; and, among them, "The Confession and Execution of Sir Walter Raleigh." Sir Walter was executed in October, 1618, when Adam Winthrop was living at Groton, England, at seventy years of age, a magistrate of the old county of Suffolk, who, a few years before, had resigned the Auditorship of Trinity College, Cambridge, which he had held for sixteen or seventeen years. His son, who twelve years afterwards came over to New England as Governor of Massachusetts, was then about thirty years old. Both of them were thus in the way of taking an intelligent interest in the public affairs of their country, and both might have personally witnessed the execution of Raleigh, had they chanced to have been in London at the time. I find no evidence that either of them was there. Meantime, no newspaper had as yet been published in England. The first regular English newspaper, entitled "The Weekly News," dates from 1622. It may thus not be without interest to inquire, from what original, in manuscript or in print, this account of what is called "The Confession and Execution of Sir Walter Raleigh" was copied, or from what source it was procured.

A new and elaborate Life of Sir Walter, together with his Letters, "now first collected," has been published in England within the last five years, by Mr. Edward Edwards, the author of "Memoirs of Libraries," and other works, which gives a detailed report of Raleigh's speech on the scaffold, in regard to which the author says, in a note, as follows: "In this speech I have very much followed Archbishop Sancroft's transcript, preserved amongst the Tanner MSS., but have collated it with other reports. No known report can, I think, be trusted exclusively." This work was published in 1868. In the following year (1869), Mr. James Augustus St. John, who had previously published a Life of Raleigh, gave a new edition of it to the public, in the preface to which he says, with plain allusion to the Life by Mr. Edwards, as follows: "Since the first publication of this biography, another Life of Sir Walter Raleigh has been laid before the public. This performance must have been produced some years ago, since the author is unacquainted with the discoveries recently made at Simancas and Madrid, which have thrown an entirely new light on the latter portions of Raleigh's Life." Mr. St. John, accordingly, in the last chapter of his volume, in describing the death of Raleigh says: "He made a short speech, the meaning of which

has scarcely been preserved. What we possess under that name it is impossible he should have uttered, unless we assume the letter to James of the 5th of October, together with his examinations, and those of La Chêne, and all his communications with the French authorities, to be forgeries. Had he denied, as he is said to have done, that he ever saw any commission, letter, or seal, from the French King, his admission to the contrary in his own handwriting would doubtless have been produced on the scaffold, to confound and silence him. We must consequently believe, either that the documents referred to were mere fabrications, or that several gentlemen who were present at his death, and heard him deliver his farewell address to the world, either misunderstood his language, or purposely misrepresented it." Upon this ground, Mr. St. John omits any detailed report of the speech, consigning the received versions of it to entire discredit. At the same time he candidly states that the original of Raleigh's letter to the King of October 5th has not been discovered, and that it is only produced in the form of a "retranslation from the Spanish version, to be found in the General Archives of Simancas." From the same source have recently come the conflicting and contradictory replies of La Chêne, the French Secretary, at his successive examinations before the English Council of State, in the first two of which he positively denies almost every thing which he confesses in the third.

Now, as to the letter of October 5, nothing can perfectly convince one that Raleigh wrote that letter within twenty-four days of his death, except the production of the original in his own handwriting, or certainly with his own unmistakable signature. Mr. St. John himself, in the paragraph with which he precedes it, gives us no small ground for suspecting the genuineness of all such copies. "Sir Thomas Wilson," he says, "it cannot be doubted, received both from the King and his Secretary [Sir Robert Naunton] orders to extract from Raleigh, by solemn promises of pardon, such admissions and confessions as, in the opinion of those who were to judge of them, would compromise! his life. In doing this, he was to insinuate, though not positively to assert, that he had high authority for the language he employed if the bait took, his masters were to disavow his proceedings, and overwhelm him with censure, but to base nevertheless upon his artifices the destruction of their victim. Naunton acknowledges frankly that such was the practice; and the number of heads which were thus brought under the axe was doubtless considerable." The admissions and confessions of this letter might thus seem to have been extracted or extorted