Note 543 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN. (continued 3)

It is scarcely necessary to point out that the three following pages are largely the fruit of Morton’s imaginative powers, and were intended for the special edification of Archbishop Laud. As Plymouth was much less well supplied with preachers than the towns of the Massachusetts colony, it is altogether probable—as Dr. John Eliot surmised, in his review of the New Canaan, in the Monthly Anthology for July, 1810—the allusions to the church-practises in this chapter found their largest basis of fact in incidents which Morton had been a witness of in the Plymouth meeting-house. It is safe to add, however, that he could have had no agreeable recollections of the meeting-houses at Boston and Charlestown.