Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/284

268 of all who had disagreed from him, as well as the honest, sturdy conviction in which he lived and died. They were written evidently but a short time before his death, and are in the beginning much after the order of his daughter's first poem.

To the old Puritan, scowling to the last at any shade of difference from the faith to which he would willingly have been a martyr, a "Libertine" included all blasphemous doubters and defiers of current beliefs—Quakers, Antinomians and other pestilent people who had already set the Colony by the ears and were soon to accomplish much more in this direction. The verses were at once creed and protest, and are a fair epitome of the Puritan mind in 1650. Other rhymes from other hands had expressed equally