in England. This was exactly what I expected, for among the tenderest and most beautiful passages of Evangeline (and to its exquisite beauty let me here bear my testimony) are those which describe the end of her pilgrimage, her lover’s death within the sound of Christ Church bells, and the tomb of them both in the little Philadelphia church yard. There is no trace in the poem of Pennsylvania’s cruelty or her proffered sale to slavery.
I had to look elsewhere for the origin of the aspersion. In Judge Haliburton’s History of Nova Scotia (vol. i, p. 183) I at last found it in the very words used by the English annotator — and herefore no authority or document is cited — the responsibility must rest.
The best mode of refuting the accusation thus made against colonial Pennsylvania is to tell, in a simple and perfectly authentic form, what deed occur here, and in doing so to revive the memory — for every day, till Evangeline appeared, the tradition was becoming feebler — of as sad an episode as the modern world’s great history affords. I know nothing more deeply pathetic ; and we may wonder, with a sentiment kindred to religious awe, at the retribution on this deed of wrong, when, at the end of a century, we find Poetry stooping to pick up from oblivion the obscure tradition of the Acadian exiles, and writing it in characters of living light to last for ever.
Let any one look through accredited histories of the day, or even contemporary correspondence more recently published, and he will find no allusion to this Exodus of the Acadians, I have curiously examined, but in vain. Neither Lord Chesterfield, nor George Grenville, nor Horace Walpole, who says a good deal about American affairs in his light way, nor any letter writer of the day, alludes to what was doing in the obscure corner of Nova Scotia. It was too humble a tragedy for the courtly gossipers of English society to trouble themselves about ; and, so far as my studies go, there is no trace of it. The most that I find are a few allusions in the Gentlemen’s Magazine of 1756 and 1757. It occurred, let me note in passing, in a dismal and diminutive period of British story ; and it is matter of pride to those who reverence (and what American student does not) the grand, heroic character of the elder Pitt, that no part of this pitiful stain rests on his administration. It was far more characteristic of Newcastle and Bubb Doddington.
For my purposes I assume the reader to be familiar with the story of the French Neutrals down to the time when they left Acadia, and I therefore turn to Pennsylvania’s welcome of them, whatever it was, merely premising that the number of exiles who left Nova Scotia early in September, 1755, was 1923, 483 men, 337 women and 1053 children. Of this number one account say 800 came to Philadelphia, though my impression is, as I have said, that it was much less.
It was certainly an unpropitious time for French Roman Catholics to come to these Puritan or Protestant colonies. It was the day of natural as well as of unreasonable excitements. It was the time when a Frenchman and an Indian
