ot only some which were distinctly secular, but even some so reprehensible that they are now difficult to find, and quite banished from orderly households.
One of his first attempts in verse was a rhymed catalogue of the books in the family library — a list which begins as follows: The Bible towering o'er all the rest, Of all other books the best.
William Penn's laborious writing And a book 'gainst Christians fighting.
A book concerning John's Baptism, Elias Smith's Universalism.
How Captain Riley and his crew Were on Sahara's desert threw.
How Rollins, to obtain the cash, Wrote a dull history of trash.
The lives of Franklin and of Penn, Of Fox and Scott, all worthy men. The life of Burroughs, too, I've read, As big a rogue as e'er was made.
And Tufts, too, though I will be civil, Worse than an incarnate devil.
Now the lives of George Burroughs and Henry Tufts were the Gil Bias and even the Guzman d'alfarache of the New England readers of a hundred years ago; the former ha
ut whom he wrote a ballad, and about whose name — translated, as is supposed, from the French Feuillevert — he has written the poem, A name.
He was also descended through his maternal grandmother from Christopher Hussey, who had married a daughter of the Rev. Stephen Bachiler, a man of distinguished appearance and character, whose reputation was clouded for two centuries by charges made in his own day, but which now seem to have been dispelled by his descendants.
See the imputations in Winthrop's Journal, and the final vindication in a paper by Charles E. Batchelder in N. E. Historical and Genealogical Register, January, 1892. Father Bachiler's striking appearance, dark, thin, and straight, black eyebrows, descended to the two men most conspicuous among his posterity, John Greenleaf Whittier and Daniel Webster.
The homestead in which Whittier was reared is to this day so sheltered from the world that no neighbour's roof has ever been in sight from it; and Whittier says of it in
