Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-34.djvu/21

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1884.]
SOME SUBURBS OF NEW YORK.
19

sonorous and most Toryish couplets in all the sonorous Toryism of the "Vanity of Human Wishes." It is evident that what exiled our Hyde was that he had made London too hot to hold him. Comparing the viceroy with his royal cousin, whom Bagehot has summed up in saying that "she was a very little-minded woman, but at the same time she was a decorous woman and a well-meaning woman," it is plain that the Stuart cross was not the worst thing that could happen to the Hyde strain. Cornbury was born a generation too late for a court congenial to him in point of morals. But he was as much too dull to have been tolerated by Etherege and Rochester and Sheffield as he was too scandalous to be tolerated by his decorous cousin. Habitual drunkenness seems to have been the most reputable of his social customs, and his political course in New Jersey was directed toward getting the most money out of the Assembly in the shortest time and with the least trouble.

RESIDENCE, SHORT HILLS, NEW JERSEY.

A governor of this kind, with an Assembly composed mostly of Quakers, who "knew their rights," and of Scotch Presbyterians, who "dared maintain," was sure to make entertaining annals, and the journals of the sessions of Assembly during Cornbury's administration (1703-1708) are the liveliest of the provincial annals of New Jersey. The Assembly began with acknowledging "Her Ma[tie's] Royal Goodness and favour towards us, in taking and keeping us under yᵉ wings of her Ma[tie's] protection and Governmᵗ, and more particularly in placing us under yʳ Excell[cy's] care and conduct, whose great diligence and Exquisite Management is yᵉ Admiration of yʳ Friends and Envy of yʳ Enemies." It is true that "divers of the members of this Assembly, being of the people called Quakers," did "make Some Exceptions to the Stile" of these addresses; but even they did "assent to the matter and substance." This was altogether too sweet to last. The governor desired a yearly salary of fifteen hundred pounds for twenty-one years, exhibiting an order from the queen, who apparently had her suspicions of him, that after his salary was settled he should not receive "any gift or present from the Assembly or other person on any account, on pain of our highest displeasure." The Assembly de-