Note 819 — Chapter V · (continued 2)

The latest writer on the theme, Doyle, in his English in America, thinks Hewatt “may probably be trusted in matters of notoriety.” Grahame (iii. 78) says: “Hewit is a most perplexing writer. A phrase of continual recurrence with him is ‘about this time,’—the meaning of which he leaves to the conjecture of readers and the laborious investigation of scholars, as he scarcely ever particularizes a date.” Again he adds (ii. p. 110): “While he abstains from the difficult task of relating the history of North Carolina, he selects the most interesting features of its annals, and transfers them to the history of the southern province. His errors, though hardly honest, were probably not the fruit of deliberate misrepresentation.” Cf. Sprague’s Annals of the Amer. Pulpit, iii. p. 251.