A large part of the work is given to New England, which he knew best; but his knowledge was at all times subservient to his prejudices, which were rarely weak. He is often amusing in his self-sufficiency, and not unentertaining; but he who consults the book is puzzled with his digressions and with his disorderly arrangement, and there is no index to relieve him.[340] Hutchinson struck the estimate which has not since been disputed: it was his “foible to speak well or ill of men very much as he had a personal friendship for them, or had a personal difference with them.”[341] Prof. Tyler in his _Hist. of American Literature_[342] has drawn his character more elaborately than others.[343] His book, while containing much that is useful to the student, remains a source of uncertainty in respect to all statements not elsewhere confirmed, and yet of his predecessors on New England history Douglass has the boldness to say that they are “beyond all excuse intolerably erroneous.”[344] A wider interest than that of ecclesiastical record attaches to a book which all students of New England history have united in thinking valuable. This is the work of Isaac Backus, a Baptist minister in Middleborough, Mass., who published at Boston in 1777 a first volume, which was called _A History of New England, with particular reference to the denomination of Christians called Baptists_.[345] This volume brought the story down to 1690 only, but an appendix summarized subsequent history down to the date of the book. In the second volume, which appeared at Providence in 1784, the title was changed to _A Church History of New England, vol. ii., extending from 1690 to 1784_. The same title was preserved in the third volume, which was published in Boston in 1796, bringing the narrative down to that date. In the preface to this volume the author complained of the many typographical errors in the first volume, and professed that though there had been private dislikes of the work by some “because their own schemes of power and gain were exposed thereby,” he knew not of any public dispute about “its truth of facts.” The whole work has been reprinted under the title of the original first volume, with notes by David Weston, and published in two volumes by the Backus Historical Society at Newton, Mass., in 1871.[346] Miss Hannah Adams published at Dedham, Mass., in 1799, a single volume, _Summary History of New England_. She does not profess to have done more than abridge the usual printed sources, as they were then understood, and to have made some use of MS. material, particularly respecting the history of Rhode Island. [Illustration: HANNAH ADAMS. This follows an oil portrait by Alexander in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. Hannah Adams was born at Medfield, in 1755, and died at Brookline, Mass., Nov. 15, 1831; and she was the first person interred at Mount Auburn.]