"
To discover any ambitious literary effort in this period, we must
turn northward again. In the middle colonies, and especially in
Philadelphia, which had now outgrown Boston in population, there
was a quickened interest in education and science. But the New
Englanders were still the chief makers of books. Three great
names will sufficiently represent the age: Cotton Mather, a
prodigy of learning whose eyes turn back fondly to the provincial
past; Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the most consummate intellect of
the eighteenth century; and Benjamin Franklin, certainly the most
perfect exponent of its many-sided life.
When Cotton Mather was graduated from Harvard 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.
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