“ [35] renew my old acquaintance [as a suitor]; she expressed her inability to be serviceable. Gave me cider to drink. I came home.” Eight months later he married Mrs. Mary Gibbs, still another widow, and himself made the prayer at the wedding, as if the time had come to take matters into his own hands. This is not, it may seem, a very noble kind of literature; but it is, at its best, one of the most permanent. The masterpieces in such intimate or first-hand literature, with its triumphs of self-revealment, are few. Samuel Sewall was not a Montaigne, or even quite a Pepys, but enough has been quoted to indicate his real if inferior success in a vein similar to theirs.
This text is part of:
“ [35] renew my old acquaintance [as a suitor]; she expressed her inability to be serviceable. Gave me cider to drink. I came home.” Eight months later he married Mrs. Mary Gibbs, still another widow, and himself made the prayer at the wedding, as if the time had come to take matters into his own hands. This is not, it may seem, a very noble kind of literature; but it is, at its best, one of the most permanent. The masterpieces in such intimate or first-hand literature, with its triumphs of self-revealment, are few. Samuel Sewall was not a Montaigne, or even quite a Pepys, but enough has been quoted to indicate his real if inferior success in a vein similar to theirs.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.