a constant, though unseen, danger, and often most cruel when it spared life. The medical treatment of the small-pox was then very bad, the patient being deprived of a change of air and subjected to a heating regimen.1

Notice has been taken of the appalling ravages of the small-pox among the Indians in 1633-4; but though no white person then took it, the disease ravaged Boston six times during her first century, and probably extended to most of the settlements of New England. One of these attacks, 1665-6, is that which Morton attributes to the comet of 1664. In 1677 a ship with the disease on board anchored at Nantasket, where she was visited by several Charlestown people. The result was another season of the pestilence, in which eight hundred deaths occurred in Boston. Nothing is said of it at Plymouth, but it probably raged there in a less degree, from the better means of supervision and isolation.

In 1721 came Boston's sixth visitation, and of her six thousand cases eight hundred and fifty were fatal. This proportion of one in seven was customary there, but it was much exceeded in England. This time the disease also extended to Plymouth; the town "suffered great distress," and a committee of twelve was chosen to aid the selectmen in preventing its spread.

Three years before this outbreak Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when in Turkey, had learned of the process of inoculation, which had there been tested upon criminals, and then applied to practice. Lady Mary introduced the treatment into England, bravely trying it upon her own son. This process rendered the disease vastly lighter, and freed it from its terrible after-work. In fact, it reduced the mortality to one in seven hundred.

In Boston, during the attack of 1721, only one physician would countenance inoculation. His name, worthy of high honor, was Zabdiel Boylston. Against his new treatment arose a fearful and alinost universal clamor. The lawyers declared that if any of his inoculated patients should die, he would be liable to the penalty of murder; the physicians indorsed this opinion, and added that the mixture of virus with the healthy human system would develop a hybrid race of beings; the clergy, as usual to the fore, denounced in

1 In 1520, the Spanish carrying this disease to Mexico, it slew 3,000,000; in 1707 it destroyed one fourth the population of Iceland, and in 1733 ravaged Greenland. The Crusaders are said to have spread it through Europe.

oculation as an attempt to thwart the foreordained will of God and a dishonoring of God's image. The violent invectives of the learned roused the rest of the people to fury. Threats of hanging Dr. Boylston were so loud that he was forced to hide for fourteen days, and to visit his patients in disguise. While one of the latter, Pastor Waller (Walley?), of Roxbury, was confined to his chamber during inoculation, a bombshell was thrown through his window to destroy him as a selfmade monster; but fortunately the fuse would not burn. In the face of this tempest of obloquy, only one leading clergyman stood forth as Dr. Boylston's defender, and showed his sincerity by having his entire family inoculated. Few readers would readily hit upon this intelligent divine, who was so ready to face both learned and popular clamor and to denounce its superstition, for he was none other than Cotton Mather, the ancient prosecutor of witchcraft!1

It is much to be wished that brave Dr. Boylston could have had a vision of the small-pox visitation at Boston seventy-six years after this outbreak. Then the people were once more frantic, but it was from a desire to be inoculated before the disease should overtake them. They surged in crowds around the physicians' offices, clamoring to be "grafted," as they called it; and in three days the operation was performed on nine thousand of them.

In 1778 Dr. Winslow inoculated three hundred at "the islands," none of whom died. These islands were doubtless Nantucket, etc. In 1802 vaccination was tried in New Jersey, and soon after in New York and Connecticut; in 1809 it was generally adopted in Boston, and in 1816 occurred the first public-vaccination in Plymouth, there being eight hundred subjects. So inoculation, introduced with such a struggle less than a century before, had even then yielded, with no great disturbance, to a still more novel process which left it more than half-way back in the path of sanitary-progress."

The inoculation excitement at Boston in 1721 became a matter of interest in royal circles. The Puritan historian Rev. Dr. Neal, of London, who had written upon it, was in 1722 invited to call upon the Princess of Wales (the future Queen Caroline). When he reached the palace the Princess laid aside Fox's "Book of Martyrs," which she was reading, and talked for an hour upon the results of inoculation in New England, and Dr. Neal's reply to the objections of a preacher there. She also made many interested inquiries as to the state of religion in New England, and the work of the Dissenting bodies of England. During this time the prince (afterwards George II.) came in and joined in the conversation.

2 What would this period have thought of Pasteur's theories of to-day?

MARRIAGE CELEBRATIONS.1

Civil marriages were the New England custom among the first generations. Nov. 4/14, 1692, the year Plymouth was merged into Massachusetts, the clergy were first authorized by the new province to solemnize marriages. Yet in the Andros period, May 18/28, 1686, was the first marriage at Boston with prayer-book and ring.

In 1647 some Bostonians desired that independent and stalwart Hingham preacher, Peter Hobart, to come up and preach at a wedding; but the magistrates forbade it, saying that they did not wish to introduce the English custom of clerical marrying which this would lead to, and moreover, the preacher in question was "averse to our ecclesiastical and civil government, and a bold speaker.”

In 1708, at Plymouth, Josiah Cotton and Hannah Sturtevant were married by Pastor Little. (Was this the first under the new rule?)

DIVORCES.

In 1661 Elizabeth Burge, of Sandwich, was divorced from Thomas, Jr., on scriptural grounds, and he was then severely whipped at Plymouth, and again at Sandwich. He soon after left the Colony.

In 1664 William Tubbs, of Scituate, sought a divorce from his wife, Mercy Sprague. After the patriarchal style, William Paybody, of Duxbury, gave him a writing of divorcement, with Lieutenant Nash and John Sprague as witnesses. The General Court treated the document as a nullity, and fined Paybody £5, and each witness £3.

In 1652 the Court had admonished Goodwife Tubbs for "mixed dancing;" and in 1668, finding that she had eloped from the Colony, it granted her husband a divorce.

In 1670 James Skiff's wife Elizabeth, daughter of Neighbor Cooper, of Boston, went to Roanoke with “another man for her husband.” Skiff lived on the Vineyard, which was not in the New Plymouth jurisdiction; but he came to the Plymouth General Court, which certified to his having a divorce from his own Court.

In 1663 Ensign John Williams, of Barnstable, was fined £10 for slandering his own wife, Sarah, and John Bayley; but ten years later he secured a divorce for scriptural cause.

1 See also next three sections.

2 The Bay Colony enacted divorces in 1639, re-enacted 1658.

MATRIMONIAL IMPEDIMENTS, ETC.

597

In 1675 Edward Jenkins, of Taunton, petitioned that his daughter Mary be divorced from Marmaduke Atkinson, who had been out of the Colony and made no provision for her during seven years or more. The decision was a singular one; namely, that while the Court "sees no cause to grant a divorce, yet they do apprehend her to be no longer bound, but do leave her to her liberty to marry if she please."

In 1680 Elizabeth Wade was regularly divorced from Thomas Stevens for his bigamy. In 1686 John Glover, of Barnstable, was divorced from Mary for scriptural cause. These six cases include all the divorces granted during the Colony's existence. In 1670 Samuel Hallowell asked for a divorce on his wife's confession of legal cause and her abuse of him; but the Court, "being not very clear," postponed this case three months, to see if the wife would persist in selfaccusations; she apparently did not, for the matter was not again mentioned.1

MATRIMONIAL IMPEDIMENTS, ETC.

In 1646 Richard Taylor complained that he was hindered from marrying Ruth Wheildon by her father, Gabriel. Wheildon, when before the Court, promised to yield.

In 1661 John Sutton sued Mary Russell for breach of promise, claiming £200; he recovered £15 and costs. Two years later John Jacob, of Scituate, marrying Mary, had the case reviewed; and as he showed the fault to have been chiefly her father's, the Court remitted 50s. of the above amount.

In 1661 also, Richard Sylvester, of Scituate, in behalf of his daughter Dinah, sued an unnamed person for breach of promise; he claimed £200, and recovered £20 and costs. In 1663 Elizabeth Soule sued Nathaniel Church for the same cause, with betrayal, and recovered £10 and costs.

In 1673 Richard Sutton, of Roxbury, testified at Plymouth to his engagement with Elizabeth Symonds, but their marriage was prevented by her parents, Moses and Sarah. The Court ordered the father to pay Sutton £3 for his time and expense, and voted to release the pair from their agreement unless they chose to renew it.

1 A slightly irrelevant matter is the law of 1671 against conjugal violence; namely, "No man shall strike his wife, nor any woman her husband, on penalty of such fine not exceeding £10, or such suitable corporal punishment as the Court shall determine."

2 See pp. 487, 501-2.

In 1679 James Willet, who had married Lieutenant Peter Hunt's daughter Elizabeth, claimed that the father had promised him £100 as an inducement, and he sued Hunt therefor, but lost his case, and had to pay the costs. Still, the marriage seems to have been an honorable and happy one.

In 1652 Jonathan Coventry was indicted for "making a motion of marriage" to Katharine Bradbury, servant to Mr. Bourne, of Marshfield, without the latter's consent. Coventry left the Colony before arrest. In the same year the Court warned Edward Holman not to frequent the house of Thomas Shrieve, and that Goodwife Shrieve do not frequent the house or company of Holman, at their peril. This proved ineffectual, for next year they were ordered to avoid each other, or be whipped; and that seems to have been enough. The year next before, the General Court admonished Samuel Eaton and Goodwife Hall, of Duxbury, for "mixed dancing;" and in 1666 John Robinson, grandson of the Leyden pastor, was bound over to carry himself properly towards Thomas Crippen's wife.

In 1648 Thomas Dunham was ordered to abstain from visiting or sending to Martha Knott, of Sandwich, from October 4 till the first Tuesday of December, that the Court may better learn of his pretended contract, unless the Governor, on the clearing of things, give him leave.

A romantic case was that of Governor Thomas Prence against Arthur Howland, Jr., nephew of the Pilgrim. The tolerant course of the elder Arthur Howland toward the Quakers had earned Prence's hearty ill-will; and when, in 1660, he found that Arthur, Jr., had wooed his daughter Elizabeth, he had the swain before the General Court, where he was fined £5 for making love without her father's permission. The couple remained constant, for in 1667 the irate Governor once more brought up young Arthur, who was again fined £5 because he had "disorderly and unrighteously endeavored to obtain the affections of Mistress Elizabeth Prence," and was put under a bond of £50 to "refrain and desist." But Prence, like Canute, was unable to control the forces of Nature. This action was in July; but before the next spring the imperious Governor seems to have been forced to capitulate, for Arthur and Elizabeth were united, and in the course of events there was a Thomas Howland and a Prence Howland.

Prence's friend and neighbor, Constant Southworth, had an experience somewhat like with his daughter Elizabeth. In his will (1679),