at the last pulsations
of their hearts were quickened by a holy and heavenly Love.

The Reviewer asks: "Were those five persons executed that day without
any spiritual adviser?" There is no evidence, I think, to show that a
Minister ever accompanied, in that character, persons convicted of
witchcraft, at the place of execution. All that can be gathered from
Brattle's account is, that, on the occasion to which he is referring,
the sufferers _themselves_ offered public prayers. We know that Martha
Corey, at a subsequent execution, pronounced a prayer that made a deep
impression on the assembled multitude. Mr. Burroughs's prayer is
particularly spoken of. So, also, in England, when the Reverend Mr.
Lewis, an Episcopal clergyman, eighty years of age, and who, for fifty
years, had been Vicar of Brandeston, in the County of Suffolk, was
executed for alleged witchcraft, the venerable man read his own funeral
service, according to the forms of his Church, "committing his own body
to the ground, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal
life."

This whole story of the spiritual relation between Mather and Proctor is
a bare fiction, entirely in conflict with all tradition and all
probability, without a shadow of support in any document adduced by the
Reviewer; and yet he would have it received as an established fact, and
incorporated, as such, in history. Liberties, like this, cannot be
allowed.

Sewall's Diary, at the date of the nineteenth of August, 1692, has this
entry: "This day George Burrough, John Willard, John Proctor, Martha
Carrier, and George Jacobs were executed at Salem, a very great number
of spectators being present. Mr. Cotton Mather was there, Mr. Sims,
Hale, Noyes, Cheever, etc. All of them said they were innocent, Carrier
and all. Mr. Mather says they all died by a righteous sentence. Mr.
Burrough, by his Speech, Prayer, protestation of his innocence, did much
move unthinking persons, which occasioned the speaking hardly concerning
his being executed."

It is quite remarkable that Cotton Mather should have gone directly home
to Boston, after the execution, and made himself noticeable by
proclaiming such a harsh sentiment against _all_ the sufferers, if he
had just been performing friendly offices to them, as "spiritual
adviser, counsellor, and comforter." Clergymen, called to such
melancholy and affecting functions, do not usually emerge from them in
the frame of mind exhibited in the langua