in 1660, the currents of national feeling no longer circulated so freely through this distant member of the body politic, and thought in America became more provincial.  The English dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage as compared with the Church of England, had the great benefit of living at the center of national life, and of feeling about them the pressure of vast bodies of people who did not think as they did.  In New England, for many generations, the dominant sect had things all its own way—­a condition of things which is not healthy for any sect or party.  Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very much like so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives, magnifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their authority over the laity.  Mather had an appetite for the marvelous, and took a leading part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an account in his Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693.  To the quaint pages of the Magnalia our modern authors have resorted as to a collection of romances or fairy tales.  Whittier, for example, took from thence the subject of his poem The Garrison of Cape Anne; and Hawthorne embodied in Grandfather’s Chair the most elaborate of Mather’s biographies.  This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and “pieces of eight.”

Of Mather’s generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief-Justice of Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is intimately known through his Diary, kept from 1673 to 1729.  This has been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, which it resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historic interest as “the petty province here” was inferior in political and social importance to “Britain far away.”  For the most part it is a chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae of his domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such haps as this:  “March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret.”  But it also affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip’s War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc.  It bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of the seventeenth century as Bradford’s and Winthrop’s Journals bear to that of the first generation.  Sewall was one of the justices who presided at the trial of the Salem witches; but for the part which he took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible, by open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of the