If they did
not choose what seems to us the wisest way of keeping the Devil out of
their household, they certainly had a very honest will to keep him out,
which we might emulate with advantage. However it be in other cases,
historic toleration must include intolerance among things to be
tolerated.
The false notion which the first settlers had of the savages by whom the
continent was beflead rather than inhabited, arose in part from what they
had heard of Mexico and Peru, in part from the splendid exaggerations of
the early travellers, who could give their readers an El Dorado at the
cheap cost of a good lie. Hence the kings, dukes, and earls who were so
plenty among the red men. Pride of descent takes many odd shapes, none
odder than when it hugs itself in an ancestry of filthy barbarians, who
daubed themselves for ornament with a mixture of bear's-grease and soot,
or colored clay, and were called emperors by Captain John Smith and his
compeers. The droll contrast between this imaginary royalty and the
squalid reality is nowhere exposed with more ludicrous unconsciousness
than in the following passage of a letter from Fitz-John Winthrop to his
father, November, 1674: "The bearer hereof, Mr. Danyell, one of the Royal
Indian blood .
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