christened the hill "Merry Mount" and held highThe New England Canaan carnival about a May-pole. The settlement soon became very offensive to its Puritan neighbors, and shortly afterward the pole was cut down by Miles Standish and his men, and Morton was sent to England. Attempting to return, he was again sent back.
Morton avenged his wrongs by writing, in England, The New England Canaan, a coarse and boisterous book, ridiculing the Puritan faith and manners. Its facts are not trustworthy, and its descriptions are grossly exaggerated. Upon the author's return to New England he was imprisoned one year for this offence. Hawthorne's May Pole of Merry Mount and Motley's Merry Mount are founded on incidents in Morton's career.
Thomas Morton of "Merry Mount" should not be confounded with Nathaniel Morton of Plymouth Colony, who published in 1669 New England's Memorial, a history of the colony from 1620 to 1646, copied largely from the history of his uncle, William Bradford, and from Winslow's Journal.
II. THEOLOGICAL WORKS.
The various theological factions that fought so fiercely throughout the Colonial era, poured into each other's ranks a leaden hail of pamphlets. The few surviving relics of these battles, with quaint, long titles, and dry-as-dust contents, are valuable now only to the historian and the antiquarian.
