settlers of the Connecticut River valley. He inherited a taste for art, as an uncle and several other relatives of the previous generation were painters, although none of them attained any particular reputation. He began painting by himself at the age of about sixteen years, and at the age of twenty entered the studio of Henry K. Brown, of Albany, New York, where he received his first and only direct instruction. His work, until the age of about forty years, was almost entirely devoted to portraits; but he is best known, and will be longest remembered, for his ideal work in figure and landscape painting, which he entered upon about 1860, but did not make his distinctive field until 1876. From the latter date, to the time of his death, he painted many important works, and was pecuniarily successful. He received probably the largest prices ever paid to an American artist for single figures: $3,000 for the Winifred Dysart, and $4,000 each for the Priscilla and Evening; Lorette. He died in Boston on the twenty-first of March, 1884, leaving a widow, four sons, and a daughter. During May, a memorial exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Fine Arts.—Editor.]
THE LOYALISTS OF LANCASTER.
By Henry S. Nourse.
The outburst of patriotic rebellion in 1775 throughout Massachusetts was so universal, and the controversy so hot with the wrath of a people politically wronged, as well as embittered by the hereditary rage of puritanism against prelacy, that the term tory comes down to us in history loaded with a weight of opprobrium not legitimately its own. After the lapse of a hundred years the word is perhaps no longer synonymous with everything traitorous and vile, but when it is desirable to suggest possible respectability and moral rectitude in any member of the conservative party of Revolutionary days, it must be done under the less historically disgraced title,—loyalist. In fact, then, as always, two parties stood contending for principles to which honest convictions made adherents. If among the conservatives were timid office-holders and corrupt self-seekers, there were also of the Revolutionary party blatant demagogues and bigoted partisans. The logic of success, though a success made possible at last only by exterior aid, justified the appeal to arms begun in Massachusetts before revolt was prepared or thought imminent elsewhere. Now, to the careful student of the situation, it seems among the most premature and rash of all the rebellions in history. But for the precipitancy of the uprising, and the patriotic frenzy that fired the public heart at news of the first bloodshed, many ripe scholars, many soldiers of experience, might have been saved to aid and honor the republic, instead of being driven into ignominious exile by fear of mob violence and imprisonment, and scourged through the century as enemies of their country. In and about Lancaster, then the largest town in Worcester County, the royalist party was an eminently respectable minority. At first, indeed, not only those naturally
