Word: puritanly
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Moral Athletes. The essential faith of America came into being in the cold, clearheaded, spacious world of Puritan New England. Authoritarian though theocracy was, moral martinets though they sometimes became, the Puritans sailed their ships into the open seas. They cultivated their moral strength like athletes training, and they used that strength out of doors, in the world, as statesmen and soldiers. "We are still drawing upon the reserves of spiritual vigor which they accumulated...
...dancing is commonplace, the book childish; and the central character (Alfred Drake, late of Oklahoma!), a happy-go-lucky figure condemned in Puritan times to wander the roads from generation to generation, lacks the tang and sinew of a Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan. What should have been an exciting show remains, at best, a pleasant song recital...
...would have little to offer without its musical substance. It is, in fact, nothing more than a song cavalcade of the United States. Alfred Drake portrays Barnaby Goodchild, a legendary rake who keeps American singing for 300 years, and not entirely free from interference. Before the play is over, Puritan ministers, Civil War top sergeants, Gay Nineties park policemen, and navy lieutenant commanders are doing their best to stop Barnaby from spreading musical mirth as he romps through America's history...
...Robert Graves, brilliant, 49-year-old veteran of 60 volumes of fiction, poetry and biography, has given Poet Milton a drubbing-on the same scanty evidence. His new novel, Wife to Mr. Milton, is an icy, wife's-eye-view of the Puritan Revolution's dourest man and greatest poet, set against the backdrop of the English Civil War. It is based on Marie's "secret diary" (which exists only in Author Graves's imagination), plus Graves's solid knowledge of Milton's life & times...
...result is, like Santayana's The Last Puritan, a novel in the form of a memoir, not autobiographical, since it centers on someone other than the author, not fiction, since what it tells really happened, not biography, since it is not confined in a rigid framework of fact. At its best, this type of work combines the narrative interest of fiction with the educative value of biography...