Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/115

Rh of mooted points by the ministers as well as people, made each man the judge of questions that agitated every mind, and problems of all natures from national down to town meeting debates, were pondered over in every Puritan home. Cotton's interest in detail never flagged, and his influence was felt at every point in the Colony, and though Ipswich, both in time and facilities for reaching it, was more widely separated from Boston than Boston now is from the remotest hamlet on Cape Cod, there is no doubt that Nathaniel Ward and Mr. Cotton occasionally met and exchanged views if not pulpits, and that the Bradstreet family were not entirely cut off from intercourse. When Nathaniel Ward became law-maker instead of settled minister, it was with John Cotton that he took counsel, and Anne undoubtedly thought of the latter what his grandson Cotton Mather at a later day wrote. "He was indeed a most universal scholar, and a living system of the liberal arts and a walking library."

Walking libraries were needed, for stationary ones were very limited. GovernerGovernor [sic] Dudley's, one of the largest in the Colony, contained between fifty and sixty books, chiefly on divinity and history, and from the latter source Anne obtained the minute historical knowledge shown in her rhymed account of "The Four Monarchies." It was to her father that she owed her love of books. She calls him in one poem, "a magazine of history," and at other points, her "guide," and "instructor," writing:

Most truly honored and as truly dear, If worth in me, or ought I do appear,