The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss

a. It is among the most beloved and honored in the annals of American piety. [1] He belonged to a very old Puritan stock, and to a family noted during two centuries for the number of ministers of the Gospel who have sprung from it. The first in the line of his ancestry in this country was Edward, who came over in the brig Hopewell, William Burdeck, Master, in 1635-6, and settled in the town of Roxbury. He was a native of Nasing, Essex Co., England. Among his fellow-passengers in the Hopewell was Mary Eliot, then a young girl, sister of John Eliot, the illustrious "Apostle to the Indians." Some years later she became his wife. Their youngest son, Samuel, was father of the Rev. Phillips Payson, who was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1705, and settled at Walpole, in the same State, in 1730. He had four sons in the ministry, all, like himself, graduates of Harvard College. The youngest of these, the Rev. Seth Payson, D.D., Mrs. Prentiss' grandfather, was born September 30, 1758, was ordained and settled at Ri