XLVIII.
Mortales optimi ducis exuvias in excavata humo,
Quam globus bellicus decidens dissiliensque defoderat,
Galli lugentes deposuerunt,
Et generosae hostium fidei commendarunt
The Annual Register for 1762.
THE FRENCH REFUGEES OF OXFORD, MASS.
An elegantly printed volume has just issued from the press of Noyes, Snow
and Co., Worcester, Mass, from the pen of George F. Daniels, containing a
succinct history of one of the earliest Massachusetts towns - the town of
Oxford; we think we cannot introduce it to the reader more appropriately,
than in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose graceful introduction
prefaces the volume.
Oliver Wendell Holmes to George F. Daniels: - "Of all my father's
historical studies," says the Autocrat of the Breakfast-table, "none ever
interested me so much as his 'Memoir of the French Protestants who settled
at Oxford, in 1686,' - all the circumstances connected with that second
Colony of Pilgrim-Fathers, are such as to invest it with singular
attraction for the student of history, the antiquary, the genealogist. It
carries us back to the memories of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, to
the generous Edict of Nantes, and the gallant soldier-king, who issued it;
to the days of the Grand Monarque, and the cruel act of revocation which
drove into exile hundreds of thousands of the best subjects of France -
among them the little band which was planted in our Massachusetts half-
tamed wilderness. It leads the explorer who loves to linger around the
places consecrated by human enterprise, efforts, trials, triumphs,
sufferings, to localities still marked with the fading traces of the
strangers who, there found a refuge for a few brief years, and then
wandered forth to know their homes no more. It tells the lovers of family
history where the un-English names which he is constantly meeting with -
Bowdoin, Faneuil, Sigourney - found their origin, and under what skies were
moulded the type of lineaments, unlike those of Anglo-Saxon parentage,
which he finds among certain of his acquaintance, and it may be in his own
family or himself. And what romance can be fuller of interest than the
story of this hunted handful of Protestants leaving, some of them at an
hour's warning, all that was dear to them, and voluntarily wrecking
themselves, as it were, on this shore, where the savage and the wolf were
waiting ready to dispute possession with the feeble intruders. They came
with their untrained skill to a region where trees were to be felled, wild
beasts to be slain, the soil to be subdued to furnish them bread, the
whole fabric of social order to be established under new conditions. They
came from the sunny skies of France to the capricious climate where the
summers were fierce and the winters terrible with winds and snows. They
left the polished amenities of an old civilization, for the homely ways of
rude settlers of another race and language. Their lips, which had shaped
themselves to the harmonies of a refined language, which had been used to
speaking such names as Rochefort and Beauvoir and Angouleme, had to
distort themselves into the utterances of words like Manchaug and
Wabquasset and Chaubunagungamang.
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