Note 664 — Chapter IX · (continued 2)

A copy of the original edition is also in the Library of the Boston Athenæum, not quite perfect. Two copies were in the sale of Mr. Brinley’s library in 1879, and they brought, one $380, the other, not perfect, $310. Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, in his learned Introduction to his edition of The True-Blue Laws of Connecticut and New Haven, and the False Blue Laws Invented by the Rev. Samuel Peters, etc., Hartford, 1876, says: “Just when or by whom the acts and proceedings of New Haven Colony were first stigmatized as Blue Laws cannot now be ascertained. The presumption, however, is strong that the name had its origin in New York, and that it gained currency in Connecticut among Episcopalian and other dissenters from the established church, between 1720 and 1750” (p. 24). He thinks that “blue” was a convenient epithet for whatever “in colonial laws and proceedings looked over-strict, or queer, or ‘puritanic’” (pp. 24, 27).