esiring
"to take the shame and blame of it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet
exposing the weakness of the prosecutors' case is indeed burned by
Increase Mather in the Harvard Yard, but the liberal party are soon to
force Mather from the Presidency and to refuse that office to his son.
In the town of Boston, once hermetically sealed against heresy, there
are Baptist and Episcopal churches--and a dancing-master. Young Benjamin
Franklin, born in 1706, professes a high respect for the Mathers, but he
does not go to church, "Sunday being my studying day," and neither the
clerical nor the secular arm of Boston is long enough and strong enough
to compel that industrious apprentice into piety.

If such was the state of New England, the laxity of New York and
Virginia needs little evidence. Contemporary travelers found the
New Yorkers singularly attached to the things of this present world.
Philadelphia was prosperous and therewith content. Virginia was a
paradise with no forbidden fruit. Hugh Jones, writing of it in 1724,
considers North Carolina "the refuge of runaways," and South Carolina
"the delight of buccaneers and pirates," but Virginia "the happy retreat
of true Britons and true Churchmen." Unluckily these Virginians, well
nourished "by the plenty of the country," have "contemptible notions
of England!" We shall hear from them again. In the meantime the witty
William Byrd of Westover describes for us his amusing survey of the
Dismal Swamp, and his excursions into North Carolina and to Governor
Spotswood's iron mines, where he reads aloud to the Widow Fleming, on
a rainy autumn day, three acts of the "Beggars' Opera," just over from
London. So runs the world away, south of the Potomac. Thackeray paints
it once for all, no doubt, in the opening chapters of "The Virginians."

To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must turn
northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in Philadelphia,
which had now outgrown Boston in population, there was a quickened
interest in education and science. But the New Englanders were still the
chief makers of books. Three great names will sufficiently represent the
age: Cotton Mather, a prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly
to the provincial past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate
intellect of the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly
the most perfect exponent of its many-sided life.

When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harv