II
The house where the martyrologist John Fox first saw the light was replaced long ago by a famous old inn, pulled down in its turn; but the many and many Americans who visit Boston may still visit the house where Jean Ingelow was born. Whether they may see more than the outside of it I do not know from experiment or even inquiry. “R. N.” will say nothing of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker; perhaps he thinks that she has spoken sufficiently for herself.
The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a pleasant bleakness, and the Witham was coldly washing under the wall which keeps St. Botolph from it. In the dimness we could have only a conjecture of the church’s outward beauty, and of the grandeur of the tower climbing into the evening, where it has hailed so many myriads of moving ships, and beckoned them to safety. But within, where it was already night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights, which showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival, began the day before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious observance. The blossoms and leaves were a little wilted and withered, but the fruits and vegetables were there in sturdy endurance, and together they swathed the pulpit from which John Cotton used to preach, and all but hid its structure from view, like flowers of rhetoric softening some hard doctrine.
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.