Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/200

184 The which she ordered with dexterity. The publick meetings ever did frequent, And in her Closet constant hours she spent; Religious in all her words and wayes Preparing still for death till end of dayes; Of all her Children, Children lived to see, Then dying, left a blessed memory."

There is a singular aptitude for marriage in these old Puritans. They "married early, and if opportunity presented, married often." Even Governor Winthrop, whose third marriage lasted for thirty years, and whose love was as deep and fervent at the end as in the beginning, made small tarrying, but as his biographer delicately puts it, "he could not live alone, and needed the support and comfort which another marriage could alone afford him." He did mourn the faithful Margaret a full year, but Governor Dudley had fewer scruples and tarried only until the following April, marrying then Catherine, widow of Samuel Hackburne, the first son of this marriage, Joseph Dudley, becoming even more distinguished than his father, being successively before his death, Governor of Massachusetts, Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Wight, and first Chief Justice of New York, while thirteen children handed on the name. The first son, Samuel, who married a daughter of Governor Winthrop, and thus healed all the breaches that misunderstanding had made, was the father of eighteen children, and all through the old records are pictures of these exuberant Puritan families. Benjamin Franklin was one of seventeen. Sir William Phipps, the son of a poor gunsmith at Pemaquid, and one of the first and most notable instances of our rather tiresome "self-made men," was one of twenty-six,