Whether University education had much effect upon the literature of New England it would perhaps be a little difficult to say. Connecticut, for example, even with Yale College as a starting-point, produced no great literary achievements. Nevertheless throughout the first century of New England's story there was a well-defined and living school of literature. The school naturally divided into two parts: that of theology, which to the ordinary modern critic is somewhat meaningless; and that of history. The historical section was composed for the most part of chronicles, glowing with patriotism, alive with the picture of the daily life, and filled with "a dignity of diction belonging to those who have assimilated the English Bible till their speech instinctively adopts its form."[225] There was the work of Winthrop; the impulsive, triumphal hymn of Edward Johnson; "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam" of Nathaniel Ward, and the writings of many others. But this period of history and theology died away as the century neared its close. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Cotton Mather may be regarded as one of the best known of Boston authors. But the curious thing about the New England literature is the total absence of anything that might be called secular. The colonies, however, were not without their poets, for they had Anne Bradstreet and Michael Gigglesworth, the works of both of whom were recognised in the seventeenth century as being of real poetical merit. This outburst of literature could never have been accomplished had it not been for the introduction of the printing-press. As early as 1638 a press was brought by Day to Boston and set up at Cambridge. A second press was introduced in 1655 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Rhode Island had its press in 1708; while Short of Boston established printing in New London, Connecticut, in 1709. By the end of the seventeenth century newspapers began to be printed, such as _The Public Occurance both Foreign and Domestic_ at Boston in 1690, to be followed fourteen years later by John Campbell's _Boston Letter_.