To the Editors of the Boston Daily Advertiser:—

By the courtesy of some unknown friend, I have received your paper of the 11th inst., containing a notice of Prof. Patterson's Address at the last Celebration at Fort Popham. As it presents some matters needing amendment, I trust your greater courtesy will allow space in your columns for a few observations.

Your correspondent has confessed a partiality for the literature [12] growing out of the first colonial occupation of the soil of New England under English enterprise; and forthwith, in a style of pleasantry, bearing with it the edge of ridicule, speaks of the efforts of its writers as scarcely better than advocates indulging in "historical waggery," whose pages "we read," as in other fiction, "to be amused."

But without attempting to reply with smiles alone to such attempts at smiling away the force of historic ve. . . Read More