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, Brown, Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the Greek and the Latin.  A page of the Magnalia is almost as richly mottled with italics as one from the Anatomy of Melancholy, and the quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his books and chapters.  He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having “angled many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven,” anagrammatizes Mrs. Hutchinson’s surname into “the non-such;” and having occasion to speak of Mr. Urian Oakes’s election to the presidency of Harvard College, enlarges upon the circumstance as follows: