Page:The works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse.djvu/51

 INTRODUCTION. xHii

simply poetical versions of what she had read. Accord- ingly, her facts and theories are often discordant with what the more accurate and thorough investigation of recent years has made certain or probable. To point out these differences wherever they occur would be at once a diffi- cult and a useless task. Her poems make it evident that she had been a faithful student of history, an assiduous reader, and a keen observer of nature and of what was transpiring both at home and abroad. She mentions many of the principal Greek and Latin authors, such as Hesiod, Homer, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Quintus Curtius, Pliny, and Seneca ; but there is no reason to suppose that she had read their works, either in the originals or in translations. A few scraps of Latin are to be found scattered through her writings ; but they are such as any one might have picked up without knowing the language. "The Ex'a6t Epitomie of the Four Monar- chies," which takes up considerably more than half of the volume of "Poems," w^as probably derived almost entirely from Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," Arch- bishop Usher's "Annals of the World," the Hebrew writ- ino-s, Pemble's "Period of the Perlian Monarchic,"* and perhaps from other historical treatises. She frequently


 * See page 250, note.

William Pemble, a learned divine, was born in Sussex, or at Egerton, in Kent, in 1591, and died April 14, 1623. One of his works was entitled " The Period of the Persian Monarchie, Wherein fundrj places of Ezra, Ne/iemiah, and Daniel are cleered. ExtraiJted, contrafted, and englillied, (much of it out of Doctor Raynolds) bj the late learned and godlj Man M''. William Pemble, of Magdalett Hall in Oxford." This is doubtless the book which Mrs. Bradstreet had seen. All of his works were separately printed after his death, and then collected in one volume, folio, in 1635, and reprinted four or five times.

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