The Mathers, Elisha Cooke, Sewall, and above all Jeremiah Dummer in his _Defence of the New England Charters_,[242] published not a little of a terse and combative strain, which the student to-day finds needful to read, if he would understand the tides and eddies of the life of the time. Boston was also nourishing some reputable chroniclers of her own story. Thomas Prince, who after his graduation had gone to England, had returned in 1717, yet to live forty years ministering to his people of the Old South, gathering the most considerable of the early collections of books and papers, illustrating in good part the history of New England,[243] and contributing less than we could wish to such stores from his own writing. Dr. William Douglass, as we have seen, had dipped into the controversies of the day, practised his pen in the public journals, not always temperately or with good taste, and thirty years later was to vent so much prejudice in his _Summary of the British Settlements_ that, though the book is suggestive, it is an unsafe guide to the student. Thomas Hutchinson, much the best of our colonial historians, was now a boy of six or seven in the forms of Master Bernard’s grammar school. * * * * * [Illustration: THOMAS PRINCE. This follows an oil painting in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. There is also of Prince a mezzotint engraving of a painting, of which there is a heliotype in the _Mem. Hist. Boston_, ii. 221. A portrait after a painting by John Greenwood is noted in the _Catal. Cabinet, Mass. Hist._ Soc., no. 26. Cf. _Proceedings_, i. 448.]