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.
