The publication of the following paper in its present form, became
possible when the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art found it
necessary to abandon their intention to publish a volume containing the
lectures given on the occasion of the opening of the American Wing. The
other lectures delivered in the course were devoted to the architecture
and arts of New England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and it therefore seemed fitting that some account of the domestic life
of the period should also have a presentation. Within the limitations
of time and space it was only possible to touch lightly upon so
far-reaching a subject and the reader will soon discover that the
following pages may be somewhat over-loaded with facts gleaned from
original records. It also should be borne in mind that the public
records that have come down to us preserve a chronicle of the offences
of the day and generation while the uneventful lives of the honest and
the just frequently rest in oblivion.
_The evil that men do lives after them
The good is oft interred with their bones._
Nevertheless, there were fully as many sinners as saints living within
the control of the Puritan autocracy in the Massachusetts Bay and it
is to be hoped that the contemporaneous data here presented may aid in
bringing about a readjustment of values in the mind of some reader.