THE POEMS OF MRS. ANNE BRADSTREET.

When it was proposed to me, not long since, to write an introduction to the edition of the poems of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet which "The Duodecimos" were about to issue, many reasons compelled me to decline the task. The request, however, led me to take up once more, after an interval of many years, the poems of "the tenth Muse," as Mrs. Bradstreet was termed on the title-page of the first edition of her verses, and I turned to the elaborate and excellent edition of them published, thirty years ago, by Mr. John Harvard Ellis. After looking them through, I came on the "Elegy upon the truly pious, peerless, and matchless gentlewoman Mrs. Anne Bradstreet," written by my ancestor the Reverend John Norton, of Hingham. I had quite forgotten its existence, and, on reading it, it struck me that there would be something of quaint appropriateness in my writing, at this

long interval, in regard to her whose praises he had sung, and that the act would not be without a certain piety toward my ancestor. And, further, I reflected, that as I could trace my descent in one line directly from Governor Thomas Dudley, the father of Mrs. Bradstreet, and as the portraits of her brother, Governor Joseph Dudley, and his wife, looked down on me every day while I sat at breakfast and dinner, she, as my aunt many times removed, might not unjustly have a claim upon me for such token of respect to her memory as had been asked of me.

Moved by these pious considerations, I revised my decision.

I am sorry that I cannot speak with admiration of my venerable ancestor Mr. John Norton's verses, but their defects may, in part at least, be excused by his youth at the time when they were written. Mrs. Bradstreet died in 1672, two hundred and twenty-five years ago, and if the Elegy were written at that time (it first appeared in the second edition of her poems in 1678) Mr. Norton was in his twenty-second year, and had graduated at Harvard the year before. His verses are artificial in sentiment, extravagant in expression, and cumbered with pedantry. The Elegy contains, indeed, two tolerably

CHIEF JUSTICE JOSEPH DUDLEY. Half-brother of Anne (Dudley) Bradstreet. From the original painting owned by

Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Cambridge, Mass.