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.
The "Diary" of Mather's fellow-townsman Judge Samuel Sewall has
been read more generally in recent years than anything written by
Mather himself.
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