Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[208] only to keep house, but to keep horse likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional felicity of printing his own sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been no great trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as 1677,--according to the traveller Dunton, who was himself in that line of business,--and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, -without whose treasures, let me add, this modest monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse, the moral sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man was fined in Newbury for “killing our elder's mare, and a special good beast she was.” The minister's house was built by the town; in Salem it was “13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies, and no gable-ends,” --so that the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else ;--and the Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put the minister's grounds in order.

Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev. Ezekiel Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England: “Much ado I have with my own family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or family duties. I had a rare blessing of servants in England, and those I brought over were a blessing; but the young brood doth much afflict me.” Probably the minister's wife had the worst of this; but she seems to have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint, and could bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase for a model woman,--