"What shall I say of Lightning and of Thunder Which kings and mighty ones amaze with wonder, Which make a Cæsar (Romes) the worlds proud head, Foolish Caligula creep under 's bed. And in a word, the world I shall consume And all therein at that great day of Doom." This is not impressive; and we may gladly skip the rest of the remarks made by the Elements. The second quaternion of poems, as shown by the title page, is concerned with the four Ages of man, wherein the first Age exclaims: "What gripes of wind mine infancy did pain What tortures I in breeding teeth sustain!" which is very excellent realism, but not highly poetical, either in sentiment or expression. The Seasons have but little more claim to a hearing than the Elements, and in the poem on the Four Monarchies, which is merely a rhymed version of Raleigh's History of the World, the only notable lines are those containing Mrs. Bradstreet's defence of her sex: "Now say, have Women worth? or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus taxed us long; But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason, Know 'tis Slander now but once was Treason." The queen to whom these lines refer is of course Elizabeth; and we can well believe that in her day so to asperse the sex as to decline to admit their possession of the attribute of reason may well have been treason sufficient, if reported to the highest quarter, to be punished by the _terrible peine forte et dure_. Although we may entirely sympathize with Mrs. Bradstreet's vigorous defence of her sex from the foul slanders of the "Masculines," it is difficult to see wherein she makes good her claim to be considered the Tenth Muse, or the Hundred and Tenth, if so many could be named. Nevertheless, at her death sermons laudatory of her life and work were preached in nearly every church in New England, and her afflicted family must have been greatly comforted by the number and expressions of the elegies with which they were fairly deluged. Here is a specimen from the pen of the Rev. John Norton: "A Funeral Eulogy, upon that Pattern and Patron of Virtue, the truly pious, peerless and matchless Gentlewoman MRS. ANNE BRADSTREET, RIGHT PANARETES, Mirror of her Age, Glory of her Sex, whose Heaven-born-Soul leaving its earthly Shrine, chose its native home, and was taken to its Rest, upon the 16th Sept. 1672." All of which strikes us as a little hyperbolic, while the phrase "Patron of Virtue" does not appear as very happily chosen, and the reference of the reverend gentleman in the body of his "poem" to the "Black, fatal, dismal, inauspicious day"