Page:The works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse.djvu/49

 INTRODUCTION. xli

Ward, who had been one of her neighbors and her minister at Ipswich ; by the Rev. Benjamin Woodbridge, and other friends and admirers of hers. There are some ana- grams on her name, a poetical dedication by her of the whole to her father,* and a prologue. The first four pieces in the book, "The Foure Elements," "The Foure Humours in Man's Conllitution," "The Four Ages of Man," and "The Four Seafons of the Year," are really four parts of one entire poem. In this the sixteen personified characters — Fire, Earth, Water, Aire, Choler, Blood, Melancholy, Flegme, Childhood, Youth, Middle Age, Old Age, Spring, Summer, Autumne, and Winter — like the embodied ab- stractions of the old English moral plays, appear upon the stage, where each sets forth successively his various quali- ties, and boasts of the great power which he exerts for good or evil in the world, f Next comes the poem on " The Four Monarchies of the World," the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman, which takes up more than half of the whole volume. To these are added, "A Dialogue between Old-

edition, may have led to a mistake as to the time when the first edition was published. Mr. Allibone, in his " Dictionary of Authors," and Mr. Gris- wold, in his " Female Poets of America," state it to have been in 1640; and in Appleton's " Cyclopaedia of Biography" it is given as 1642. Both dates are wrong, the first edition being published in 1650.
 * The date, March 20, 1643, attached to this Dedication in the second

t The Percy Society have reprinted, in the twenty-second volume of their "Publications," "one of the earliest moral plays in the English language known to exist," called ''The Interlude of the Four Elements." Some of the " dyvers matters whiche be in this Interlude conteynyd," are " Of the sytuacyon of the iiij. elementes, that is to say, the Yerth, the Water, the Ayre, and Fyre, and of their qualytese and propertese, and of the gen- eracyon and corrupcyon of thynges made of the commyxton of them."

But none of the Elements themselves are players, and there is nothing contained in the play similar to what we find in Mrs. Bradstreet's verses.

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