Page:The works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse.djvu/58

 1 INTRODUCTION.

are substituted in the second, the following : —

" Which Alexanders wrath incens'd fo high, Nought but his life for this could fatisfie ; From one flood bj he fnacht a partizan, And in a rage him through the body ran." *

These last two lines must have come from Plutarch.

" Then Alexander taking a partifan from one of his guard, as Clitus was coming towards him, and had lift vp the hanging be- fore the doore, he ranne him through the body, fo that Clitus fell to the ground, and fetching one grone, died prefently." f

So, notwithstanding her allusion to Galen and Hippoc- rates, | it is almost certain that she obtained her wonder- fully exact description of human anatomy from the "curious learned Crooke,"§ whose "Description of the Body of Man" had gone through three editions in London in 163 1.

Mrs. Bradstreet's familiarity with the Bible is apparent all through her writings. There are traces of her having used the Genevan Version, which, for many reasons, was more acceptable to the Puritans than the authorized one of King James.


 * See pages 2S3 and 2S4, note /', and page xlvii.

t North's Plutarch. London: 1631. p. 700.

X See page 143.

§ See page 144. Probably Helkiah Crooke, M.D., of whose works Watt has the following in his " Bibliotheca Britannica," Vol. i. p. 272, w. : —

^' MiKpoKoafioypa(j)ia, or a Description of the Body of Man, collected and translated out of all the best Authors of Anatomy, especially out of Caspar, Bauchinus, and A. Sourentius. Lond. 1615, 161S, 1631. fol. A large work, illustrated with the plates of Vesalius and others. — An Explanation of the fashion and use of three and fifty Instruments of Chirurgery. Lond. 1631, fol. The same Lond. 1634, Svo. Taken chiefly from Parey." [Am- brose Pare, a French surgeon.]

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