From time to time the colonists to the south may have sneered at or even condemned the severity of New England life, but in the main the merchants of New York and the planters of Virginia and Maryland realized and respected the moral worth and earnest nature of the Massachusetts settlers.  For example, the versatile Virginia leader, William Byrd, remarks sarcastically in his History of the Dividing Line Run in the Year 1728:  “Nor would I care, like a certain New England Magistrate to order a Man to the Whipping Post for daring to ride for a midwife on the Lord’s Day”; but in the same manuscript he pays these people of rigid rules the following tribute:  “Tho’ these People may be ridiculed for some Pharisaical Particularitys in their Worship and Behaviour, yet they were very useful Subjects, as being Frugal and Industrious, giving no Scandal or Bad Example, at least by any Open and Public Vices.  By which excellent Qualities they had much the Advantage of the Southern Colony, who thought their being Members of the Establish’t Church sufficient to Sanctifie very loose and Profligate Morals.  For this reason New England improved much faster than Virginia, and in Seven or Eight Years New Plymouth, like Switzerland, seemd too narrow a Territory for its Inhabitants."[14]

Those early New Englanders may have been frugal and industrious, giving no scandal nor bad example; but the constant repression, the monotony, the dreariness of the religion often wrought havoc with the sensitive nerves of the women, and many of them needed, far more than prayers, godly counsel and church trials, the skilled services of a physician.  Two incidents related by Winthrop should be sufficient to impress the pathos or the down-right tragedy of the situation: 

“A cooper’s wife of Hingham, having been long in a sad melancholic distemper near to phrensy, and having formerly attempted to drown her child, but prevented by God’s gracious providence, did now again take an opportunity....  And threw it into the water and mud ...  She carried the child again, and threw it in so far as it could not get out; but then it pleased God, that a young man, coming that way, saved it.  She would give no other reason for it, but that she did it to save it from misery, and with that she was assured, she had sinned against the Holy Ghost, and that she could not repent of any sin.  Thus doth Satan work by the advantage of our infirmities, which would stir us up to cleave the more fast to Christ Jesus, and to walk the more humbly and watchfully in all our conversation.”

“Dorothy Talby was hanged at Boston for murdering her own daughter a child of three years old.  She had been a member of the church of Salem, and of good esteem for goodliness, but, falling at difference with her husband, through melancholy or spiritual delusions, she sometime attempted to kill him, and her children, and herself, by refusing meat....  After much patience, and divers admonitions not prevailing,