Seven English Cities

by William Dean Howells

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.

We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went a long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church, under which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the dimness, after we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there seemed shipyards along the river’s course, but at one place there was a large building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the windows we decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and near our own Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette making was almost the chief industry of the mother Boston. There are really two large tobacco factories there running overtime, and always advertising for more women and girls to do their work; and in our Boston, not so long ago, smoking in the street was forbidden! Such are the ironies of life.

What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember. The Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay twenty feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny ferry which the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest ferries, near the tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the town through streets of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to dignify their course. Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and at one place a little excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to come in and float it for the fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten o’clock. We idly longed to make its voyage with it, and if the chance were offering now, I certainly should not forego it as I did then. But when you are in a foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled and how well you know that it will not offer soon again, you reject the most smiling chance because you think you can take it any time.

The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get a Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o’clock I found the fruiterer’s locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered for the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other fruiterers, but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different it would have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the market people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls with vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and knotty apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of that idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for all, I must own was not an impressive place.