from national down to town meeting debates, were pondered over in
every Puritan home. Cotton's interest in detail never flagged, and
his influence was felt at every point in the Colony, and though
Ipswich, both in time and facilities for reaching it, was more
widely separated from Boston than Boston now is from the remotest
hamlet on Cape Cod, there is no doubt that Nathaniel Ward and Mr.
Cotton occasionally met and exchanged views if not pulpits, and
that the Bradstreet family were not entirely cut off from
intercourse. When Nathaniel Ward became law-maker instead of
settled minister, it was with John Cotton that he took counsel,
and Anne undoubtedly thought of the latter what his grandson
Cotton Mather at a later day wrote. "He was indeed a most
universal scholar, and a living system of the liberal arts and a
walking library."

Walking libraries were needed, for stationary ones were very
limited. Governer Dudley's, one of the largest in the Colony,
contained between fifty and sixty books, chiefly on divinity and
history, and from the latter source Anne obtained the minute
historical knowledge shown in her rhymed account of "The Four
Monarchies." It was to her father that she owed her love of books.
She calls him in one poem, "a magazine of history," and at other
points, her "guide," and "instructor," writing:

"Most truly honored and as truly dear,
If worth in me, or ought I do appear,
Who can of right better demand the same?
Then may your worthy self from whom it came?"

As at Cambridge, and in far greater degree, she was cut off from