Mrs. Bradstreet's family, as the career of her brother, Governor Joseph Dudley, indicates, kept in closer touch with England than was common in America; and besides she was clearly a person of what would nowadays be called culture. Partly for these reasons her work seems neither individual nor local. In seventeenth-century New England, indeed, she stands alone, without forerunners or followers; and if you compare her poetry with that of the old country, you will find it very like such then antiquated work as the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies, published in 1599, the year which gave us the final version of Romeo and Juliet. In its own day, without much doubt, the little pure literature of seventeenth-century New England was already archaic. Apart from this, New England produced only annals, Summary. records, and, far more characteristically, writings of the class which may be grouped broadly under theology. Just as our glance at the history of seventeenth-century America revealed no central convulsions like the Commonwealth, dividing an old epoch from a new, so our glance at the American publications of this century reveals no central figure like Milton's standing between the old Elizabethan world which clustered about Shakspere, and the new, almost modern, school of letters which gathered about Dryden. The Mathers. A fact perhaps more characteristic of seventeenth-century America than any publication was the foundation in 1636 of Harvard College, intended to preserve for posterity that learned ministry which was the distinguishing glory of the immigrant Puritans. In the history of Harvard College during the seventeenth century the most conspicuous individuals were probably President INCREASE MATHER (1639-1723) and his son COTTON MATHER (1663-1728). The younger of these wrote very voluminously. During forty-two years of literary activity, however, he never changed either his style or his temper. His work falls chiefly though not wholly under the two heads of religion and history, which with him were so far from distinct that it is often hard to say under which a given work or passage should be grouped. These heads are the same which we have seen to include most American writings of the seventeenth century. Cotton Mather's work, in short, is so thoroughly typical of American publications throughout his time that a little study of him will best define for us what seventeenth-century writing in America really was. Life. V COTTON MATHER REFERENCES WORKS: No collected edition. The Magnalia has been thrice reprinted, 2 vols., Hartford, 1820, 1853, and *1855. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: A. B. P. Marvin, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1892; *B. Wendell, Cotton Mather, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1891; *Tyler, II, 64-91. BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. L. Sibley, Harvard Graduates, III, 42-158. SELECTIONS: Carpenter, 4-12; Duyckinck, I, 64-66; Hart, Contemporaries, I, No. 148, and II, No. 12; Stedman and Hutchinson, II, 114– 166. COTTON MATHER (1663-1728) was the son of Increase Mather, a minister already eminent, and the grandson of John Cotton and of Richard Mather, two highly distinguished ministers of the immigration. In 1678 he took his degree at Harvard College. Only three years later, in 1681, he became associated with his father as minister of the Second Church in Boston, where he preached all his life. To understand both his personal history and his literary work, we must never forget that the Puritan fathers had believed New England charged with a divine mission to show the world what human society might be when governed by constant devotion to the revealed law of God. This is nowhere better stated than by Cotton Mather himself in the general introduction to his Magnalia: "In short, the First Age was the Golden Age: To return unto That, will make a Man a Protestant, and I may add, a Puritan. 'T is possible, that our Lord Jesus Christ carried some Thousands of Reformers into the Retirement of an American Desert, on purpose, that with an opportunity granted unto many of his Faithful Servants, to enjoy the precious Liberty of their Ministry, tho' in the midst of many Temptations all their days, He might there To them first, and then By them, give a Specimen of many good Things, which he would have His Churches elsewhere aspire and arise unto: And This being done, He knows whether there be not All Done, that New England was planted for; and whether the Plantation may not, soon after this, Come to Nothing." In the course of seventy years, the political power of ministers had tended on the whole to wane. Increase and Cotton Mather, able and earnest men, opposed with all their hearts every innovating tendency. Thus, with many other ministers, they were forced into active support of the witch-trials at Salem in 1692. The collapse of these trials, in spite of ministerial effort, may be said to mark the end of theocracy in New England. Nine years later, in 1701, the orthodox party in the church had another blow. Increase Mather, after sixteen years as President of Harvard College, was finally displaced by a divine of more liberal tendencies. This really ended the public career of both father and son. In the public life of New England, as in that of the mother country, we may say, the ideal of the Common Law finally supplanted the theocratic ideal of the Puritans, and at the oldest of New England seminaries the ideal of Protestantism finally vanquished that of priesthood. Cotton Mather lived on until 1728, preaching, writing numberless books, and doing much good scientific work; among other things, he was the first person in the English The End of in New Mather's speaking world to practise inoculation for small-pox. Untiringly busy, hoping against hope for well on to thirty years, he died at last with the word Fructuosus* on his lips as a last counsel to his son. Undoubtedly he was eccentric and fantastic, so stubborn, too, that those who love progress have been apt to think him almost as bad as he was queer. For all his personal eccentricity, however, he seems on the whole the most complete type of the oldestfashioned divine of New England. He was born in Boston and educated at Harvard College; he lived in Boston all his life, never straying a hundred miles away. Whatever else his life and work mean, they cannot help expressing what human existence taught the most intellectually active of seventeenth-century Yankees. Here, of course, we are concerned with him only as a man of letters. His literary activity was prodigious. Sibley's Harvard Graduates records some four hundred titles of his actual publications; besides this, he wrote an unpublished treatise on medicine which would fill a folio volume; and his unpublished Biblia Americana-an exhaustive commentary on the whole Bible-would fill two or three folios more. He also left behind him many sermons, not to speak of letters and diaries, which have never seen print. And, at the same time, he was one of the busiest ministers, one of the most insatiable scholars and readers, and one of the most active politicians whom America has ever known. To discuss in detail such an outpour is impracticable; but Cotton Mather's most celebrated book, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, which was made towards the middle of his life * Fruitful. |