Seven English Cities eBook

Apparently, however, Cotton’s doctrine was not anywise too hard, or even hard enough, for such “a factious people, who were imbued with the Puritan spirit,” as he found in Boston, when he was first elected vicar of St. Botolph’s; and it was not till Archbishop Laud’s ecclesiastical tyrannies began that he came to see “the Sin of Conformity” and to preach resistance.  His conflict with the authorities went so far that exile to another Boston in another hemisphere became his only hope.  Or, as Lord Dorset intimated, “if he had been guilty of drunkenness, uncleanness, or any lesser fault, he could have obtained his pardon, but as he was guilty of Puritanism, and Non-conformity, the crime was non-pardonable; and therefore he advised him to flee for his safety.”

The Cotton Chapel, so called, was restored mainly with moneys received from Cotton’s posterity, lineal or lateral, in his city of refuge overseas, and “the corbels that support the timbered ceiling are carved with the arms of certain of the early colonists of New England.”  Edward Everett, one of Cotton’s descendants, wrote the dedicatory inscription in Latin, which “R.  N.” has Englished in verse, and I am the more scrupulous to quote it, because, as I must own with my usual reluctant honesty, I quite missed seeing the Cotton Chapel.

     That here John Cotton’s memory may survive
     Where for so long he labored when alive,
     In James’ reign and Charles’, ere it ceased—­
     A grave, skilled, learned, earnest parish-priest;
     Till from the strife that tossed the Church of God
     He in a new world sought a new abode,
     To a new England, a new Boston came,
     (That took, to honor him, that reverend name)
     Fed the first flock of Christ that gathered there—­
     Till death deprived it of its shepherd’s care—­
     There well resolved all doubts of mind perplext,
     Whether with cares of this world or the next;
     Two centuries five lustra from the year
     That saw the exile leave his labors here,
     His family, his townsmen, with delight—­
     (Whom to the task their English kin invite)—­
     To the fair fane he served so well of yore,
     His name, in two worlds honored, thus restore,
     This chapel renovate, this tablet place,
     In this, the year of man’s recovered Grace,
                         1855.

III

I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night, but I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous; the effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already tucked away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath.  The tombs were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of some were true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to require even women to be pretty.

[Illustration:  THE RIVER AT EVENING]