Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/171

Rh being a stimulant to every student of the prophecies: "The Period of the Persian Monarchy, wherein sundry places of Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel are cleered, Extracted, contracted and Englished, (much of it out of Dr. Raynolds) by the late learned and godly man, Mr. William Pemble, of Magdalen Hall, in Oxford."

This she read over and over again, and many passages in her poem on the "Four Monarchies" are merely paraphrases of this and Raleigh's work, though before a second edition was printed she had read Plutarch, and altered here and there as she saw fit to introduce his rendering. Galen and Hippocrates, whom she mentions familiarly, were known to her through the work of the "curious learned Crooke," his "Description of the Body of Man, Collected and Translated out of all the best Authors on Anatomy, especially out of Gasper, Banchinus, and A. Sourentius," being familiar to all students of the day.

If her muse could but have roused to a sense of what was going on about her, and recorded some episodes which Winthrop dismisses with a few words, we should be under obligations that time could only deepen. Why, for instance, could she not have given her woman's view of that indomitable "virgin mother of Taunton," profanely described by Governor Winthrop as "an ancient maid, one Mrs. Poole. She went late thither, and endured much hardships, and lost much cattle. Called, after, Taunton."

Precisely why Mrs. Poole chose Tecticutt, afterward Titicut, for her venture is not known, but the facts of her rash experiment must have been discussed at length, and moved less progressive maids and matrons to envy or pity as the chance might be.