with the heroic, and with all that sheds a heavenly lustre upon our race and proclaims its lofty origin. We hate to have our own idols shattered, even while confessing that they are but idols, and we would not therefore voluntarily shatter the idols of others. Who willingly would think of Jason and his brave Argonauts as sailing on a voyage of discovery solely to establish new commercial relations? Yet this was all that Jason sought to achieve by his voyage of discovery, so that when at length he had won the Golden Fleece, ever guarded by the sleepless dragon, abundant success had crowned his efforts. Now Lord Baltimore was Maryland's Jason, and commercial prosperity his Golden Fleece. And the world, commonly in its judgments fairly accurate, and always finally impartial, has not misunderstood this. Accordingly the founder of Maryland has found his appropriate place, not among the world's benefactors, the Isaac Newtons, the Francis Bacons, the Gallileos, and the Keplers; the Luthers, Savonarolas, Augustines and the St. Pauls, but among the men of lower rank and inferior aim, the promoters of the mere trading schemes and colonization enterprises, the birth of which every age has witnessed, but in which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries more especially abounded. Here then we take our leave of George Calvert— neither sage nor philosopher, pilgrim father nor public benefactor-but politician, merchant, adventurer, whose creed and life alike were no better than the creed and life of many thousands of other Englishmen who lived in his own age. CHAPTER VII. THE CHARTER OF MARYLAND. 1632. England, our Mother's Mother! Come, and see Beats in our hearts. -R. H. STODDARD, "Guests of the State." 1 Two months after Lord Baltimore's death, the charter of his new province, written in Latin, “the only one of the colonial charters the original of which is in that language" finally passed the Great Seal of England, with no other changes in its wording than the substitution of the name of Cecilius in place of his father's. The province was named Maryland or Terra Mariæ. It had been the wish of the elder Baltimore to have it called Crescentia, but the king was firm for Maryland. Virginia memorialized the virgin queen, Elizabeth, and Maryland should memorialize his own beloved queen, so that side by side in the new world should be the twin memorials of the two English queens. Its generous The province was of vast extent. limits were defined in the chapter's opening paragraphs :— "Charles, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. * To all to whom these presents shall come, greeting. "Know ye therefore that we favoring the pious and noble purpose of the said Baron of Baltimore, of our special grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion, have given, granted and confirmed, and by this our present charter, do give, grant and confirm, unto the said Cecilius, now Baron of Baltimore, his heirs and assigns, all that part of a Peninsula lying in the parts of America between the ocean on the east, and the Bay of Chesapeake on the west, and divided from the other part thereof by a line drawn from the promontary or Cape of Land called Watkins Point, (situate in the aforesaid bay, near the river of Wighco)2 on the west, unto the main ocean on the east, and between that bound on the south unto that part of Delaware Bay on the north which lyeth under the fortieth degree of northerly latitude from the equinoctial, where New England ends; and all that tract of land between the bounds aforesaid that is to say, passing from the aforesaid bay called Delaware Bay in a right line by the degree aforesaid, unto the true meridian of the first fountain of the river Potomack, and from thence tending towards the south unto the further bank of the aforesaid river, and following the west and south sides thereof, unto a certain place called Cinquack,3 situate near the mouth of the said river, where it falls into the bay of Chesapeake, and from thence by a straight line unto the aforesaid promontary, and place ealled Watkins Point." 4 1 Fisher, Men, Women and Manners, Vol. II, Page 154. 2 Now called the Pocomoke. 3 Now Smith's Point. 4 This description of the bounds of the Province was framed by the aid of the map in Smith's History of Virginia, which : All this, a province large as an empire, was given without money and without price. It was as if King Charles, addressing Cecilius Calvert, had appropriated the language of scripture: "Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever. Arise,. walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee." 5 All, all, in this vast territory, was his which corresponded with the description then given-hactenus inculta-"hitherto uncultivated." What a princely gift! What a splendid property! And yet what a tremendous responsibility? A young man, twenty-eight years of age, suddenly finds himself the largest land owner in the king's dominions. Let anyone take one of the Chesa"may safely challenge a comparison in point of accuracy with the maps of this day," McMahon, Page 2. A glance at the map of Maryland, will show that the present boundaries of the state are by no means the same as the boundaries here given. Maryland has, in fact, been deprived of a strip forty miles wide, extending from east to west along her northern border. This loss of a territory now embracing the whole of Delaware, and a large portion of Pennsylvania, including the site of Philadelphia itself, she owes to William Penn who obtained it by perjury. See his letter in the Md. Hist. Soc's care. 5 Genesis XIII, 14, 15, 17. |