Page:The works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse.djvu/77

 INTRODUCTION. Ixix

day.* Among her descendants may be counted the cele- brated divine, Dr. Wm. E. Channing ; the Rev. Joseph Buckminster, of Portsmouth, N.H., his accomplished son, the Rev. J. S. Buckminster, and his daughter, Mrs. Eliza B. Lee, who has so gracefully recorded her father's and her brother's lives ; Mr. Richard H. Dana, the poet, and his son, the Hon. R. H. Dana, Jr., eminent as a man of letters, a law3^er, and a jurist; Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poet and humorist ; Mr. Wendell Phillips, the orator ; and Mrs. Eliza G. Thornton, of Saco, Maine, whose verses were once highly esteemed. f

After Mrs. Bradstreet's death, her husband married, June 6, 1676, the widow of Captain Joseph Gardner, of Salem, who was killed in the storming of the Narragansett fort in December, 1675. She was a daughter of Emanuel Downing, and sister of Sir George Downing, Bart., who graduated in the first class of Harvard College, and became afterwards Ambassador from Cromwell and Charles II. successively at the Hague. She was born in London, but came to New England when very young. Her step-son Simon describes her as "a Gentl. of very good birth & education, and of great piety & prudence." X

Mass. Hist. Coll. Vol. viii. p. 75 ; Vol.x. p. 170: Caulkins's New London, p. 193.
 * Budington. pp. 111-16 and 125; Sprague's Annals, Vol. i. pp. 241-43;

t See the " Pedigree of Bradstreet," in Drake's folio History of Boston, and the "Descendants of Governor Bradstreet," in N. E. Hist. Gen. Register, Vol. viii. pp. 312-25, and Vol. ix. pp. 1 13-21. A book was published in Lon- don in 185S, with the title of " Six Legends of King Golden-Star, a poem by Anna Bradstreet." Whether this lady is a descendant or not I cannot say.

X MS. Diary.

She died at Salem, April 19. 1713, leaving no children by either husband. N. E. Hist. Gen. Register, Vol. xii. p. 219. Her will, with notes, is printed in the Essex Institute Collections, Vol. iv. pp. 185-90.

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