Thomas Wentworth Higginson - National Studies in American Letters; Old Cambridge

Old Cambridge

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

Old Cambridge, Thomas W. Higginson

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ISBN: 9783849651480

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Old Cambridge, as it was formerly called, to distinguish it from the later settlements called East Cambridge and Cambridgeport, is one of the few American towns that may be said to have owed their very name and existence to the pursuits of letters. Laid out originally by Governor John Winthrop as a fortified town,--furnished soon after with a pallysadoe, of which the large willows on Holmes's Field are the last lingering memorial,--it might nevertheless have gone the way of many abortive early settlements, had it not been for the establishment of Harvard College there. We Cambridge boys early learned, however, that this event was due mainly to the renown attained, as a preacher and author, by the Rev. Thomas Shepard, known in his day as the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing Mr. Shepard, a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, England, who came to America in 1635. A voluminous author, some of whose works are yet reprinted in England, he was the ruling spirit of the Cambridge synod, which was held in 1637 to pronounce against antinomian and familistic opinions. He was described by his contemporaries as a poor, weak, pale-complectioned man, yet such was his power that the synod condemned under his guidance about eighty opinions, some blasphemous, other erroneous, all unsound, as even the tolerant Winthrop declared. By this and his other good deeds he so won the confidence of the leaders of the colony that when a college was to be founded, Cotton Mather tells us, Cambridge rather than any other place was fixed upon to be the seat of that happy seminary. On the wrecks of eighty unsound or blasphemous opinions there was thus erected one happy seminary. And the college also brought with it the name of the English university city, so that the settlement first called Newetowne became in May, 1638, Cambridge, and has thus ever since remained. And so essentially was the college the centre of the whole colony, as well as of the town, that there exists among the manuscripts of the Massachusetts Historical Society a memorandum, dated September 30, 1783, to the effect that in the early days the persons appointed to lay out roads into the interior did it only so far as the bank by Mrs. Biglow's house in Weston, and that this they considered to be quite as far as would ever be necessary, it being about seven miles from the college in Cambridge.

Fifty years ago, Cambridge boys knew all this tradition very well; and they knew also that the soul-ravishing Mr. Shepard, after publishing a dozen or so of his books in England, printed the last two upon the press which came to Cambridge in the very year when the town assumed its name. We all knew the romance of the early arrival of this press; that the Rev. Joseph Glover, a dissenting minister, had embarked for the colony in 1638 with his wife, his press, his types, and his printer, Stephen Daye; that Mr. Glover died on the passage, but the press arrived safely and was at length put in the house of President Dunster, of Harvard College; that this good man took into his charge not merely the printing apparatus, but the Widow Glover, whom he finally made his wife. For forty years all the printing done in the British Colonies in America was done on this press, Stephen Daye being followed by his son Matthew, and he by Samuel Green. We know that the first work printed here was The Freeman's oath, in 1639; and that about a hundred books were thus printed before 1700, this including Eliot's English Bible. It was not till 1674, nearly forty years later, that a press was set up in Boston; and Thomas in his History of printing says that the press of Harvard College was, for a time, as celebrated as the press of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England.

And not merely were the foundations of the town and of the college thus laid in literature, but the early presidents of Harvard were usually selected, not merely for soundness of doctrine,which was not always their strong point,--but for their scholarship and even supposed literary taste. President Dunster, for instance, was an eminent Oriental scholar and performed also the somewhat dubious service of preparing the New England psalm book. As originally compiled it had dissatisfied Cotton Mather, who had hoped that a little more of art was to be employed in it, and good Mr. Shepard thus ventured to criticise its original compilers, the Rev. Richard Mather of Dorchester and the Rev. Messrs. Eliot and Welde of Roxbury:--

You Roxb'ry poets, keep clear of the crime Of missing to give us very good rhyme, And you of Dorchester, your verses lengthen But with the text's own words you will them strengthen.

Presidents Charles Chauncey and Urian Oakes published a few sermons the latter offering one with the jubilant title, The Unconquerable, All Conquering and More than Conquering Soldier, which was appropriately produced on what was then called Artillery Election in 1674. President Increase Mather was one of the most voluminous authors of the Puritan period, and from his time (1701) down to the present day there have been few presidents of Harvard University who were not authors.

All these men we Cambridge children knew, not by their writings, from which we happily escaped, but from their long-winded Latin inscriptions on the flat stones in the.Cambridge cemetery. These we studied and transcribed and, with a good deal of insecurity, translated; indeed, one boy whom I knew well, son of the college librarian, made a book of them all, which is still known to collectors.

Thus we learned of President Charles Chauncey, who died in 1672, that his tomb was the grave of praesidis vigilantissini, viri plane ntegerrimi, concionatoris eximii, pietate pariter ac liberali eruditione ornatissimi. It seemed to us far more impressive than the tenderer tribute to his wife, who died four years before him :

Here lies enterr'd wthin this Shrine

A spirit meeke, a Soule divine,

Endow'd wth. grace, & piety

Excelling in humility:

Preferring Gods commands above

All fine delights & this World's love.

We used to read also of the Rev. Edward Wigglesworth, S. T. D. (1765), whose virtues took thirty-three lines to inscribe them, and of whom it is recorded that he made his Hebrew lectures not only profitable for teaching, but delightful to all cultivated minds (Ad docendum mire accomodatas, literatis item omnibus probatissimas reddiderunt). He was also, Conjux peramans, parens benevolentissimus ; and it is expressly stated that while he was candid in controversy he was also exceedingly vigorous -Simul et acer, nervosus, praepotens extitit. If so, it is not strange that Dr. Chauncey in his sketch of him praises his catholic spirit and conduct, in spite of great temptations to the contrary.

From these we turned to the humbler tomb of Thomas Longhorn, the town drummer, who died in 1685, aged about 68 years, or of Thomas Fox, whose death was in 1693, and who had a quarter of a century before been ordered by the selectmen to look to the youth in time of public worship, & to inform against such as he find disorderly ; or, perhaps with vague curiosity to that of Jane, a negro servant to Andrew Boardman, who died in 1741, when Massachusetts still held slaves.