Delaware inquirer. (Wilmington, Del.) 1859-18??, 1859-05-07
JOHN ROGERS AND HIS "NINE CHILDREN
WITH ONE AT THE BREAsTu

wan VNn al iitF bhEhol.
A WRITER in the Cambridge (NIasS,) Chronicle
thus puts at rest the vexed question--how
many children had John Rogers (which has
puzzled all readers of the Old New England
Primer -
How often have children been puzzled BY
the ambiguity of the expression, thine small
children and one at the breast. . not knowing
whether the last named was intended to be in
cluded in, or added to, the number first men
toned. Sometimes they tried to solve the
difficulty by counting the heads of the child
rem in the picture but the artist, modestly
declining to NEEDLE with matters beyond his
business, used, in the old primers, TO leave
the matter as much in the dark as he found it.
glorious indistinctness in the picture rem
ders it utterly impossible to distinguish the
children of the martyr from the common crowd;
and thus, in obscurity the matter remained for
nearly two centuries. In the recent edition.
with an historical introduction by II. Hum
phrey, D. D., President of Amherst College,
and in the one of which over one hundred
thousand copies have lately been circulated by
the Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, the
publishers have attempted to settle the matter
by giving us distinct picture, in which the
spectators are left out, and the wife and nine
children besides the one at the breast are plain
ly represented.
The earliest published history ofthe martyr
dom is Foxes "Acts and Monuments of these
latter and perilous Days, printed in London
A. d. 1862, only seven years after the death Of
Rogers, and whilst his numerous family were
living. II contains the following statement -
s'His wife and children, being XI. IN number.
\. able TO go out and one sucking on her breast,
met him on The ,eay as he rent fowardS Smith
field"
Any person inclined to sceptieism as to the
accuracy of the proposed correction, may per
ceive slight degree of ambiguity in the langu-
age of Foxe therefore produce another evil
dence. In Middleton's Evangelical Biography.
vol. l, page 1902, we read -
tHis wife and ten children bg her side ,ritL
one at her breast met him BY the apdy.n
As the matter is one which has become hal
lowed in the minds of many by early associ-
ations they may he unwilling to change their
long cherished views without still further testi-
m0ny of the correctness of the alterations. For
their benefit will give one extract from a rec
ent publication-the result of great research
and work of the highest authority on his
torical and other matters pertaining to the
period of which it treats--"1'he Annals of the
English Bible, by Christopher Anderson. Lon
dorx 1854 On the 18th page of the second
volume, may be found this passage =
'1he people @ere giriag thanks for his CON
stancy but there among tie crowd, there met him
the pife, whom neither Gardiner nor Bonner
l0omd permit him 10 see. His rife, the foreigner,
ruth all her children. \ Y The eldest nor
nearly seventeen gears Of age; The youngest, or
ELEVENTH child, an unconscious babe now hang
ing at The mothers breast p
Thus it has been shown from the highest
English authority-the earliest and the latest
that the true number OF Mrs Rogers child
rem was not nine, nor ten, but eiecea. The
error may at first have been merely typograph-
cal-arising from the transposition Of the
letters XII. as originally printed in
eoxe. Later historians, copying at second
iand have helped to perpetuate the error.