There is here much cause for smiling, especially in old Dr. Mather's unconscious snobbery as to the "paradise of an earldom," even to italicising the important word, and to his wonder how anyone could leave such delights for the goal of a "desart"; but there is also some moving if equally unconscious pathos, and for this, as well as for the fact of Lady Arabella's being the first feminine name to come down to us from Plymouth in the dignity of history, her virtues and fate are here recorded. Moreover, that otherwise unfamed lady from Bohemia who left her "plate" behind her in her search for religious liberty deserves to be rescued from oblivion. [Illustration 4: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH. After the painting by C. Y. Turner. _We are told of Priscilla, "the Puritan Maiden" in Longfellow's poem_ The Courtship of Miles Standish, _and we are entirely at liberty to account her a real personage if we desire to do so. It is at least certain that Miles Standish was the valiant captain pictured by the poet and that John Alden to whom the poet ascribes the office of deputy-wooer was of the Pilgrim Fathers._] In the same vessel that brought Lady Arabella to the inhospitable shores of America there came another woman whose name better deserves memorial, as far as is concerned lasting influence of life, than does that of the saintly lady commemorated by Cotton Mather. Anne Dudley was the daughter of an old servitor of the Count of Lincoln, the father of Lady Arabella, and was herself married to Simon Bradstreet, destined to be governor of Massachusetts. She was as devout and devoted as Lady Arabella herself, and she was of yet finer stamp in that she was a poet. She was a Puritan of the Puritans; her father was later elected to be governor of the colony, preceding his son-in-law in that distinguished position, so that Anne Bradstreet must have been from the beginning of her life permeated with the very spirit of Puritanism. One would not think that such training and environment would be favorable to the fostering of the poetic faculty; severity of creed and the aesthetic soul do not often go hand in hand. Yet she was the first professional poet of New England,--indeed, probably of America; and, if fault be found for calling her a poet of America when she was not a native product, answer may be made that the New Englanders strenuously claimed her as their own under the title of the Tenth Muse, and that she was, if not a product of the soil of Massachusetts, at least a product of the spirit that made that soil sacred. She was very young, not yet twenty, when she arrived at Plymouth, and most of her poems were written during the first decade of her residence in the colony. Since, in this portion of our history there are few feminine names upon which to expatiate, it may not be a waste of space to give in full the title page of the first volume of poems issued by the "American Sappho":