She sustained the last painful scene
Far from every friend,

And exhibited an example of calm resignation.
Her departure was on the 25th of July, 1788,
In the 37th year of her age.

The tears of strangers watered her grave."

NE could scarcely find a romance

more inextricably interwoven with

the lives of eighteenth-century New England ministers than that of the woman to whom this stone still stands (though sadly worn) in the old burying-ground at Peabody, near Salem. A mystery for many years, the inscription and the traditions to which it gave rise

is believed by many

to have furnished Hawthorne with the inspiration for the central character in his

Scarlet Letter." Only within the last dozen or so years have we come to know quite certainly that the heroine of the suggestive tablet was the daughter of a well-known Hartford clergyman, and a

descendant through her mother from that Stanley renowned as the friend of William Shakespeare.

In a novel called "The Coquette," first published in 1800, by Mrs. Hannah Foster, wife of a minister at Brighton, Massachusetts, the facts of Elizabeth Whitman's curiously checkered career were so entertainingly distorted, and the character of the heroine, called "Eliza Wharton " throughout the book, so maliciously misrepresented, that the novel ran through endless editions, and was in its day second only in interest to the well-known stories of "Clarissa Harlowe" and "Charlotte Temple." In style the three books are indeed very similar, and the character of the seducer of "Eliza Wharton " is undoubtedly modelled upon that of the Lovelace in Richardson's novel. But the book, as has been said, is notoriously careless of the

facts in Elizabeth Whitman's life, and its author, though a kinswoman of the girl whose sad story she essays to tell, has put the worst possible construction upon every incident in a career which, full to the brim as it is of mystery, one yet cannot examine and believe sinful.

On her mother's side, as already stated, Elizabeth Whitman was akin to Thomas Stanley, who, when he came to Hartford in 1636, brought with him some curious old Stanley silver and the tradition that he was a descendant of Shakespeare's friend. This Stanley rose to be one of the governor's assistants. And it was his great-grandson, Nathaniel Stanley, treasurer of the Colony of Connecticut, who, in 1750, gave his daughter Abigail in marriage at Hartford to the Reverend Elnathan Whitman, pastor of the Second Church, and one of the fellows of the Cor