Dawson regards it as scandalously improbable that the honest, discreef, humble, and virtuous inhabitants of this strictly rural county, fearing Cod ami loving their lawful king, could have had anything in common with the greedy, smuggling merchants and unblushing political deina1 Although this performance of Dawson's is very elaborate, ii is really Inn a fragment, terminating with tin- battle of White Plains. It was undertaken by its anther as a contributien to Scharfs History, and occupies two hundred and eighty pages of theflrst volume of

that work. Notwithstanding the enormous labor manifestly expended upon it. it possesses little interest for the general reader, being prodigiously formal in its style and burdened with excessive redundancies. It is pre-eminently one of the curiosities of historical literature.

HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

gogues of New York City, who stirred up the naughty rebellion and prepared woe and havoc for the poor, loyal countryman. "Such a community as that which constituted the County of Westchester," says lie, "a community of well-situated, intelligent, and well-to-do farmers, diligently and discreetly attending to its own affairs, without the disturbing influences of any village or county coterie, has generally been distinguished for its rigid conservatism in all its relations; and such a community has always been more inclined to maintain those various long-continued, well-settled, and generally satisfactory relations with more than ordinary tenacity, preferring very often to continue an existing inconvenience or an intangible wrong, to which it had become accustomed, rather than to accept, in its sterol, the possibility of an advantage, indefinitely promised, in an untried and uncertain change." This curious theory he supports in his application of it to Westchester County by the single tangible statement that "there is not any known evidence of the existence, at any time, of any material excitement among these farmers, on any subject." It is of course unprofitable to discuss either the general proposition of Mr.