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“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.
It was begun in 1673, nine years earlier than the first entry in Mather's Diary, and it ends in 1729, while Mather's closes in 1724.
As a picture of everyday happenings in New England, Sewall's Diary is as far superior to Mather's as
New Haven. Yale University. Press. 1921.
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