Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/344

328 another point: "Simon Bradstreet, a man hardened in Blood and a cruel persecutor."

There is a curious suggestiveness in another count of the same indictment. "Simon Bradstreet and William Hathorn aforesaid were Assistant to Denison in these executions, whose Names I Record to Rot and Stink as of you all to all Generations, unto whom this be left as a perpetual Record of your Everlasting Shame."

William Hathorn had an unwholesome interest in all sorrow and catastrophe, the shadow of these evil days descending to the representative Nathanael Hawthorne, whose pen has touched Puritan weaknesses and Puritan strength, with a power no other has ever held, but the association was hardly more happy for Bradstreet then, than at a later day when an economical Hathorn bundled him out of his tomb to make room for his own bones.