his usual manner, and upon some Occasion with much Solemnity charged all the Family to carry it well unto their Mistress who was now confined by Sickness, he Supp'd, and then took a turn or two abroad for his Meditations. After that he came in to bid his Wife Good-night, before he left her with her Watchers; which when he did, she said, Methinks you look sad! Whereto he reply'd, The Dif ferences risen in the Church of Hartford make me so; she then added, Let us e'en go back to our Native Country again; to which he answered, You may, (and so she did) but I shall die here. This was the last Word that ever she heard him speak; for now retiring unto his Lodging in another Chamber, he was overheard about midnight fetching a Groan; and unto one, sent in presently to enquire how he did, he answered the Enquiry with only saying, Very Ill! And without saying any more, he fell asleep in Jesus: In the Year 1657 loosing Anchor from New-Haven for the better."

Finally, the last clause of a ponderous sentence from his life of Thomas Shepard, first minister of Cambridge, is far more characteristic of Mather than are many of the oddities commonly thought of when his name is mentioned:

"As he was a very Studious Person, and a very lively Preacher; and one who therefore took great Pains in his Preparations for his Publick Labours, which Preparations he would usually finish on Saturday, by two a Clock in the Afternoon; with Respect whereunto he once used these Words, God will curse that Man's Labours, that lumbers up and down in the World all the Week, and then upon Saturday, in the afternoon goes to his Study; whereas God knows, that Time were little enough to pray in and weep in, and get his Heart into a fit Frame for the Duties of the approaching Sabbath; So the Character of his daily Conversation, was A Trembling Walk with God."

"A trembling walk with God," you shall look far for a nobler phrase than that, or for one which should more truly characterise not only Thomas Shepard, but the better life of all the first century of New England. In old New England there were really more such characters as the Puritans deemed marked for God's elect than are recorded of almost any other society of equal size and duration in human history. For this fact we can account in modern terms which would have been strangely unwelcome to Cotton Mather and the

godly personages whose memories he has preserved. In their New England, the pressure of external fact was politically and socially relaxed; except with the brute forces of nature the struggle for existence was less fierce than in almost any other region now remembered. Individuals could there progress from cradle to grave with less distortion than must always be worked by such social struggles as changed the England of Elizabeth through that of Cromwell into that of William III., and as have steadily altered and developed the course of European history ever since. Relax the pressure which a dense society brings upon human life, and the traits of human nature which will reveal themselves in a simpler world are generally traits which those who love ideals are apt to call better. Such relaxation of pressure blessed pristine New England; the results thereof the "Magnalia" records.

These it records with an enthusiasm which, in spite of the pedantic queerness of Mather's style, one grows to feel more and more vital. What is more, amid all his vagaries and oddities, one feels too a trait which even our few extracts may perhaps indicate. Again and again, Cotton Mather writes with a rhythmical beauty which recalls the enthusiastic spontaneity of Elizabethan English, so different from the English which came after the Civil Wars. And though the "Magnalia" hardly reveals the third characteristic of Elizabethan England, no one can read the facts of Cotton Mather's busy, active life without feeling that this man himself, who wrote with enthusiastic spontaneity, and who in his earthly life was minister, politician, man of science, scholar, and constant organiser of innumerable good works, embodied just that kind of restless versatility which characterised Elizabethan England and which even to our own day has remained characteristic of New England Yankees.

For if the lapse of seventy years had not left New England unchanged, it had altered life there far less than men have supposed. The "Magnalia The "Magnalia" was published two years after

Dryden died; and even the few extracts at which we have been able to glance will show that it groups itself not with such work as Dryden's, but rather with such earlier work as that of Fuller or even of Burton. As a man of letters, Cotton Mather, who died in the reign of George II., had more in common with that generation of his ancestors which was born under the last of the Tudors than with any later kind of native Englishmen.

VI

SUMMARY

OUR hasty glance at the literary history of America during the seventeenth century has revealed some facts worth remembering. In 1630, when Boston was founded, the mature inhabitants of America, like their brethren in England, were native Elizabethans. In 1700 this race had long been in its grave. In densely populated England, meanwhile, historical pressure social, political, and economic alike - had wrought such changes in the national character as are marked by the contrast between the figures of Elizabeth and of King William III. The dominant type of native Englishmen had altered: national experience was steadily accumulating. In America there had been no such external pressure; and though the immigrant Puritans had long been no more, and though isolation was making the inhabitants of New England more and more provincial, they had preserved to an incalculable degree the spontaneous, enthusiastic, versatile character of their immigrant ancestors. In literature seventeenth-century England had expressed itself in at least three great and distinct moods, of which the dominant figures were Shakspere, Milton, and Dryden. Though America had meanwhile produced hardly any pure letters, it had continued, long after Elizabethan temper had faded from the native literature of England, to keep alive with little alteration those minor phases of Elizabethan thought and feeling which had expressed the temper of the ancestral Puritans. In history and in literature alike, the story of seventeenth-century America is a story of unique national inexperience.