However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of rhetorical tropes and malecontent millionnaires.  The Puritan divine could commonly afford not only to keep house, but to keep horse likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional felicity of printing his own sermons.  As to the last privilege there could have been no great trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as 1677,—­not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors are,—­and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two different works for his own share.  Books were abundant enough at that day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester,—­without whose treasures, let me add, this modest monograph never could have been written.  As for the minister’s horse, the moral sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man was fined in Newbury for “killing our elder’s mare, and a special good beast she was.”  The minister’s house was built by the town; in Salem it was “13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies and no gable-ends,”—­so that the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else;—­and the Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put the minister’s grounds in order.

Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble.  Rev. Ezekiel Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,—­“Much ado I have with my own family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or family duties.  I had a rare blessing of servants in England, and those I brought over were a blessing; but the young brood doth much afflict me.”  Probably the minister’s wife had the worst of this; but she seems to have been generally, like the modern minister’s wife, a saint, and could bear it.  Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase for a model female,—­“one who deserved to marry a priest”; and one of the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old gentleman’s own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an “ingenious child,” as he calls her, whom his parish thought by no means a model female, but from whom it took three days of solitary fasting and prayer to wean him at last.

He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat strangely.  Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard at Cambridge, as aforesaid, married his predecessor’s widow “on the general recommendation of her,” and the college students were greatly delighted, as one might imagine.  Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, in 1691, wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have seen in manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,—­one of which treats of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care.  She having children of her own,