Of all the great preachers who came to New England in our first age, there were three who, according to the universal opinion of their contemporaries, towered above all others,--Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Cotton. These three could be compared with one another; but with them could be compared no one else. They stood apart, above rivalry, above envy. In personal traits they differed; they were alike in bold and energetic thinking, in massiveness of erudition, in a certain overpowering personal persuasiveness, in the gift of fascinating and resistless pulpit oratory. “_The Simple Cobbler of Agawam._”--Soon after his arrival in Massachusetts, Nathaniel Ward became minister to a raw settlement of Puritans at Agawam, the beautiful Indian name of that district, afterward foolishly exchanged for Ipswich. Early in 1645, he commenced writing the remarkable book, _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_, which will keep for him a perpetual place in early American literature. It had the good fortune to fit the times and the passions of men; it was caught up into instant notice, and ran through four editions within the first year. _The Simple Cobbler of Agawam_ may be described as a prose satire upon what seemed to the author to be the frightful license of new opinions in his time, both in New England and at home; upon the frivolity of women and the long hair of men; and finally upon the raging storm of English politics, in the strife then going forward between sects, parties, Parliament, and King. It is a tremendous partisan pamphlet. After all, the one great trait in this book which must be to us the most welcome, is its superiority to the hesitant, imitative, and creeping manner that is the sure sign of a provincial literature. The first accents of literary speech in the American forests seem not to have been provincial, but free, fearless, natural. Our earliest writers, at any rate, wrote the English language spontaneously, forcefully, like honest men. We shall have to search in some later period of our intellectual history to find, if at all, a race of literary snobs and imitators--writers who in their thin and timid ideas, their nerveless diction, and their slavish simulation of the supposed literary accent of the mother-country, make confession of the inborn weakness and beggarliness of literary provincials.