ard in 1678, in his sixteenth
year, he was publicly complimented by President Oakes, in fulsome Latin,
as the grandson of Richard Mather and John Cotton. This atmosphere of
flattery, this consciousness of continuing in his own person the famous
local dynasty, surrounded and sustained him to the end. He had a less
commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility
was excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often
chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he
was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, carrying daily
such burdens of mental and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a
normal man. Increase Mather published some one hundred and fifty books
and pamphlets: Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John
Norton, in his sketch of John Cotton, remarks that "the hen, which
brings not forth without uncessant sitting night and day, is an
apt emblem of students." Certainly the hen is an apt emblem of the
"uncessant" sitter, the credulous scratcher, the fussy cackler who
produced the "Magnalia."

Yet he had certain elements of greatness. His tribal loyalty was
perfect. His ascetic devotion to his conception of religious truth was
absolute. His Diary, which has recently been published in full, records
his concern for the chief political events in Europe in his day, no less
than his brooding solicitude for the welfare of his townspeople, and his
agony of spirit over the lapses of his wayward eldest son. A "sincere"
man, then, as Carlyle would say, at bottom; but overlaid with such
"Jewish old clothes," such professional robings and personal plumage
as makes it difficult, save in the revealing "Diary," to see the man
himself.

The "Magnalia Christi Americana," treating the history of New England
from 1620 to 1698, was published in a tall London folio of nearly 800
pages in 1702. It is divided into seven books, and proceeds, by methods
entirely unique, to tell of Pilgrim and Puritan divines and governors,
of Harvard College, of the churches of New England, of marvelous events,
of Indian wars; and in general to justify, as only a member of the
Mather dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne
and Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found
much honey in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and a
biographer like Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton Mather in
Paradise.