ther, Peter Folger; and Mather, in his
life of the elder Winthrop, says that "tho' he wrote not after the
preacher, yet such was his _attention_ and such his _retention_ in
hearing, that he repeated unto his family the sermons which he had
heard in the congregation." These discourses were commonly of great
length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was silently
inverted while the orator pursued his theme even unto "fourteenthly."

The book which best sums up the life and thought of this old New
England of the seventeenth century is Cotton Mather's _Magnalia Christi
Americana_. Mather was by birth a member of that clerical aristocracy
which developed later into Dr. Holmes's "Brahmin Caste of New England."
His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. His father was Increase
Mather, the most learned divine of his generation in New England,
minister of the North Church of Boston, President of Harvard College,
and author, _inter alia_, of that characteristically Puritan book, _An
Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_. Cotton Mather
himself was a monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence. He was
graduated from Harvard at fifteen. He ordered his daily life and
conversation by a system of minute observances. He was a book-worm,
whose life was spent between his library and his pulpit, and his
published works number upward of three hundred and eighty. Of these
the most important is the _Magnalia_, 1702, an ecclesiastical history
of New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I.
Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous
Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its
eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI. Wonderful
Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord--that is, an account of the
Afflictions and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the
Indians. The plan of the work thus united that of Fuller's _Worthies
of England_ and _Church History_ with that of Wood's _Athenae
Oxonienses_ and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_.

Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers
used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but, as literary
fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother-country,
that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists
introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner.
Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton,