Ellen Lothrop became the wife of Ezekiel Cheever, the great schoolmaster; and I should consider myself false to all good learning, if I allowed the name of this famous old man to slip by, without pausing to pay homage to it.  His record, as a teacher of a Latin Grammar School, is unrivalled.  Twelve years at New Haven, eleven at Ipswich, nine at Charlestown, and more than thirty-eight at Boston,—­more than seventy in all,—­may it not be safely said that he was one of the very greatest benefactors of America?  With Elijah Corlett, who taught a similar school at Cambridge for more than forty years, he bridged over the wide chasm between the education brought with them by the fathers from the old country, and the education that was reared in the new.  They fed and kept alive the lamp of learning through the dark age of our history.  All the scholars raised here were trained by them.  One of Cotton Mather’s most characteristic productions is the tribute to his venerated master.  It flows from a heart warm with gratitude.  “Although he had usefully spent his life among children, yet he was not become twice a child,” but held his faculties to the last.  “In this great work of bringing our sons to be men, he was my master seven and thirty years ago, was master to my betters no less than seventy years ago; so long ago, that I must even mention my father’s tutor for one of them.  He was a Christian of the old fashion,—­an old New England Christian; and I may tell you, that was as venerable a sight, as the world, since the days of primitive Christianity, has ever looked upon.  He lived, as a master, the term which has been, for above three thousand years, assigned for the life of a man.”  Mather celebrated his praises in a poetical effusion:—­

“He lived, and to vast age no illness knew,
Till Time’s scythe, waiting for him, rusty grew. 
He lived and wrought; his labors were immense,
But ne’er declined to preterperfect tense.

* * * * *

’Tis Corlett’s pains, and Cheever’s, we must own,
That thou, New England, art not Scythia grown.”

To our early schoolmasters, as Mather says, and the later too, I may add, it is owing, that the whole country did not become another Scythia.

Ezekiel Cheever was in this country as early as 1637.  He was then in New Haven, sharing in the work of the first settlement of that colony, teaching school as his ordinary employment, but sometimes preaching, and in other ways helping to lay the foundations of church and commonwealth.  While there, he had a family of several children.  The first-born, Samuel, became the minister of Marblehead.  In 1650, he was keeping a school at Ipswich.  About this time, he lost his wife.  On the 18th of November, 1652, he married Ellen, the sister whom Captain Lothrop had brought with him from England.  They had several children; one of them, Thomas, was ordained first at Malden, and afterwards at Chelsea.  The old schoolmaster died on the 21st of August, 1708, aged ninety-three years and seven months.  His son Thomas reached the same age.  Samuel, the minister at Marblehead, was eighty-five years old at his death.  The name of Ezekiel, jr., appears on the rate-list of the village parish as late as 1731, so that he must have reached the age of at least seventy-seven years.