The social life of the chief town of New England passed on, meanwhile, in the shadow of these ominous uncertainties. Jeremy Gridley had as early as 1731 started _The Weekly Rehearsal_, and had given the more scholarly classes this to ponder upon, and that to be entertained with, in columns more purely literary than they had ever known before. If such people welcomed the poems of Isaac Watts,—and one which Watts addressed to Belcher was just now printed in Boston,—they caused Richard Fry, an English printer, freshly come to Boston, to hold a high opinion of their literary taste, because they relieved his shelves of twelve hundred copies of the poems of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire bard. In 1731 they listened at a Thursday lecture to Colman’s eulogy of Thomas Hollis as a patron of learning; and the neighboring college mourned in him the principal benefactor of this time. Lemercier, the minister of the Huguenots in Boston, published a Church History of Geneva (1732), which was a passing talk. Cox, a bookseller near the town house, got out (1734) a _Bibliotheca Curiosa_, describing his stock,—enormous for the times. Thomas Prince, the minister of the Old South, let his antiquarian zeal bring back the early struggles of the first settlers, when he printed (1731) the homely _Memoirs_ of Roger Clap, of Dorchester, while the century sermons of Foxcroft in Boston (1730), and of Callender in Rhode Island (1739), made the pews slumbrous then, and command big prices to-day. Thomas Prince, moreover, was in travail with his _Chronological History of New England_. He published it in 1736, and the General Court paused to take note of it, and forgot for a moment money schemes and revivals to learn how in the “year 1, first month, 6th day” Adam appeared, to lead the long chronology which Prince felt bound to run down before he got to his proper theme. He had already wearied everybody so much, when he had gone far enough to embrace two or three years only of the New England story, that no one longer encouraged him, and “the leading work of history published in America up to that time” remains a fragment for the antiquaries to regret.[273]