Anne Bradstreet and Her Time | Page 7

ambassador to Sweden, left behind him a
reputation for stately and magnificent entertaining, which his admirers
could never harmonize with his persistent refusal to conform to the
custom of drinking healths. In the report of this embassy printed after
Whitelock's return and republished some years ago, occurs one of the
best illustrations of Puritan social life at that period. "How could you
pass over their very long winter nights?" was one of the questions
asked by the Protector at the first audience after his return from The
embassy.
"I kept my people together," was the reply, "and in action and
recreation, by having music in my house, and encouraging that and the
exercise of dancing, which held them by the eyes and ears, and gave
them diversion without any offence. And I caused the gentlemen to
have disputations in Latin, and declamations upon words which I gave
them." Cromwell, "Those were very good diversions, and made your
house a little academy."

Whitelock, "I thought these recreations better than gaming for money,
or going forth to places of debauchery."
Cromwell, "It was much better."
In the Earl of Lincoln's household such amusements would be common,
and it was not till many years later, that a narrowing faith made Anne
write them down as "the follyes of youth." Through that youth, she had
part in every opportunity that the increased respect for women afforded.
Many a Puritan matron shared her husband's studies, or followed her
boys in their preparation for Oxford or Cambridge, and Anne
Bradstreet's poems and the few prose memorials she left, give full
evidence of an unusually broad training, her delicacy of health making
her more ready for absorption in study. Shakespeare and Cervantes
were still alive at her birth, and she was old enough, with the
precocious development of the time, to have known the sense of loss
and the general mourning at their death in 1616. It is doubtful if the
plays of the elder dramatists were allowed her, though there are hints in
her poems of some knowledge of Shakespeare, but by the time girlhood
was reached, the feeling against them had increased to a degree hardly
comprehensible save in the light of contemporaneous history. The
worst spirit of the time was incorporated in the later plays, and the
Puritans made no discrimination. The players in turn hated them, and
Mrs. Hutchinson wrote: "Every stage and every table, and every
puppet- play, belched forth profane scoffs upon them, the drunkards
made them their songs, and all fiddlers and mimics learned to abuse
them, as finding it the most gameful way of fooling."
If, however, the dramatists were forbidden, there were new and
inexhaustible sources of inspiration and enjoyment, in the throng of
new books, which the quiet of the reign of James allowed to appear in
quick succession. Chapman's magnificent version of Homer was
delighting Cavalier and Puritan alike. "Plutarch's Lives," were
translated by Sir Thomas North and his book was "a household book
for the whole of the seventeenth century." Montaigne's Essays had been
"done into English" by John Florio, and to some of them at least
Thomas Dudley was not likely to take exception. Poets and players had,

however, come to be classed together and with some reason, both alike
antagonizing the Puritan, but the poets of the reign of James were far
more simple and natural in style than those of the age of Elizabeth, and
thus, more likely to be read in Puritan families. Their numbers may be
gauged by their present classification into "pastoral, satirical,
theological, metaphysical and humorous," but only two of them were in
entire sympathy with the Puritan spirit, or could be read without serious
shock to belief and scruples.
For the sake of her own future work, deeper drinking at these springs
was essential, and in rejecting them, Anne Dudley lost the influence
that must have moulded her own verse into much more agreeable form
for the reader of to-day, though it would probably have weakened her
power in her own day. The poets she knew best hindered rather than
helped development. Wither and Quarles, both deeply Calvinistic, the
former becoming afterward one of Cromwell's major-generals, were
popular not only then but long afterward, and Quarles' "Emblems",
which appeared in 1635, found their way to New England and helped to
make sad thought still more dreary. Historians and antiquaries were at
work. Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World," must have given
little Anne her first suggestion of life outside of England, while
Buchanan, the tutor of King James, had made himself the historian and
poet of Scotland. Bacon had just ended life and labor; Hooker's
Ecclesiastical Polity was before the world, though not completed until
1632, and the dissensions of the time had given birth to a "mass