clined to make an allowance which it could not retract whenever the governor became obstreperous, and observed, "We doubt not, were her majesty rightly informed of the poverty and circumstances of our country, and that our livelihoods depend upon the seasons of the year, our most gracious sovereign would pity our condition, and never expect the settlement of any support of the government further than from year to year." Thereupon the resentful Cornbury absented himself from New Jersey nearly all the year, and revenged himself upon the Assembly by taking bribes to license a monopoly of the wagon-traffic between Perth Amboy and Burlington, insomuch that a farmer could not transport his own produce upon his own cart, and to dissolve the Assembly, lest it should enforce the collection of rents due the agents of the proprietors. After these exhibitions of his "Exquisite Management," there is nothing fulsome to be found in the addresses of the Assembly, which, indeed, remark upon the official conduct and moral character of his excellency in a strain of complete candor. The remonstrances and replies are still very amusing reading. Cornbury was overcome with indignation at the proceedings of the Assembly, which he ascribed to the diabolical acts of "Samˡ Jennings and Lewis Morris, men known neither to have good principalls nor good moralls," but who had, nevertheless, prevailed with "the major part of the house to joyn with them in destroying, as far as in them lay, the Reputation of a Gent who has the honour to serve the Queen as Governour of this Province." It is particularly edifying to learn that his excellency was much concerned about the religious condition of New Jersey, "and the wicked lives and practices of a number of people, some of whom, under the pretended name of Christians, have dared to deny the very essence and being of the Saviour of the world."
The scene of these vivacious controversies was alternately Burlington and Perth Amboy; and Perth Amboy has scarcely seen times so exciting since the queen was moved to recall her scapegrace cousin "under fire" and to send out Lord Lovelace in his stead. The Perth Amboy of our day does not seem, to the tourist who has occasion to resort to it with a view to produce magazine articles or to investigate the manufacture of terra-cotta, as if it had ever been the theatre of exciting events. We can scarcely comprehend how its inhabitants once fondly fancied that it was to become the commercial rival of New York. As a Dutch settlement, it had been named Amboy in memory of the Dutch Amboyna in the East Indies, which it was expected to rival in the West, and when the Earl of Perth became one of the syndicate, as we should say now, which bought out Carteret's grant, the title of that nobleman was prefixed to its surname. Even so lately as in 1757, when Burke wrote his "Account of the European Settlements in America," Perth Amboy was "the only town of any trade worth notice in New Jersey." Burke adds that it had "a very fine harbor," which it still retains, and it is not easy to find any flaw in the calculations of the real-estate speculators who founded it, that it ought to be an "emporium" two centuries after their time. In point of fact, except for the fire-clay industry, the scene of Cornbury's revels is almost as decayed from its former estate as the Persepolitan courts "where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;" and the mild seediness of the Jersey capital is, on the whole, less impressive than the awful solitudes of the palace of Xerxes.
Of the very oldest Jersey the reminiscences at Bergen, imperfect and fragmentary as they are, are thus the most complete that can be had, and even this degree of preservation they owe to the elevation and detachment of the old village and the power of inertia residing in its original inhabitants. They were not melancholy nor unfriended, like the tourist by their ancestral stream the lazy Scheldt, but they were remote and slow. The Jersey suburbs, which have lain more directly across the course of empire, have in their successive up-buildings pretty much destroyed the
