Anne Bradstreet and Her Time | Page 9

landing in Boston in September, 1633."
Long before this crisis had come, Thomas Dudley had been recalled by
the Earl of Lincoln, who found it impossible to dispense with his
services, and the busy life began again. Whether Anne missed the

constant excitement the strenuous spiritual life enforced on all who
made part of John Cotton's congregation, there is no record, but one
may infer from a passage in her diary that a reaction had set in, and that
youth asserted itself.
"But as I grew up to bee about fourteen or fifteen I found my heart
more carnall and sitting loose from God, vanity and the follys of youth
take hold of me.
"About sixteen, the Lord layd his hand sore upon me and smott mee
with the small-pox. When I was in my affliction, I besought the Lord,
and confessed my Pride and Vanity and he was entreated of me, and
again restored me. But I rendered not to him according to ye benefit
received."
Here is the only hint as to personal appearance. "Pride and Vanity," are
more or less associated with a fair countenance, and though no record
gives slightest detail as to form or feature, there is every reason to
suppose that the event, very near at hand, which altered every prospect
in life, was influenced in degree, at least, by considerations slighted in
later years, but having full weight with both. That Thomas Dudley was
a "very personable man," we know, and there are hints that his daughter
resembled him, though it was against the spirit of the time to record
mere accidents of coloring or shape. But Anne's future husband was a
strikingly handsome man, not likely to ignore such advantages in the
wife he chose, and we may think of her as slender and dark, with heavy
hair and the clear, thoughtful eyes, which may be seen in the potrait of
Paul Dudley to-day. There were few of what we consider the typical
Englishmen among these Puritan soldiers and gentry. Then, as now, the
reformer and liberal was not likely to be of the warm, headlong Saxon
type, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and open to every suggestion of pleasure
loving temperament. It was the dark-haired men of the few districts
who made up Cromwell's regiment of Ironsides, and who from what
Galton calls, "their atrabilious and sour temperament," were likely to
become extremists, and such Puritan portraits as remain to us, have
most of them these characteristics. The English type of face altered
steadily for many generations, and the Englishmen of the eighteenth

century had little kinship with the race reproduced in Holbein's portraits,
which show usually, "high cheek-bones, long upper lips, thin eyebrows,
and lank, dark hair. It would be impossible ... for the majority of
modern Englishmen so to dress themselves and clip and arrange their
hair, as to look like the majority of these portraits."
The type was perpetuated in New England, where for a hundred years,
there was not the slightest admixture of foreign blood, increased
delicacy with each generation setting it farther and farther apart from
the always grosser and coarser type in Old England. Puritan abstinence
had much to do with this, though even for them, heavy feeding, as
compared with any modern standard was the rule, its results being
found in the diaries of what they recorded and believed to be spiritual
conflicts. Then, as now, dyspepsia often posed as a delicately
susceptible temperament, and the "pasty" of venison or game, fulfilled
the same office as the pie into which it degenerated, and which is one
of the most firmly established of American institutions. Then, as
occasionally even to day, indigestion counted as "a hiding of the Lord's
face," and a bilious attack as "the hand of the Lord laid heavily on one
for reproof and correction." Such "reproof and correction" would often
follow if the breakfasts of the Earl of Lincoln and his household were
of the same order as those of the Earl of Northumberland, in whose
house "the family rose at six and took breakfast at seven. My Lord and
Lady sat down to a repast of two pieces of salted fish, and half a dozen
of red herrings, with four fresh ones, or a dish of sprats and a quart of
beer and the same measure of wine ... At other seasons, half a chine of
mutton or of boiled beef, graced the board. Capons at two-pence apiece
and plovers (at Christmas), were deemed too good for any digestion
that was not carried on in a noble stomach."
With the dropping of fasts and meager days, fish was seldom used, and
the Sunday morning breakfast of Queen Elizabeth and her retinue in
one of her "progresses" through the country, for which three oxen and
one