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If I may, in any thing, serve their Majesties interest here, I shall, on that account, think myself happy, and shall always study to approve myself, My Lord, "Your most humble, thankful and obedient Servant, INCREASE MATHER. "BOSTON, N. E. June 23, 1692. "To the Rt. Hon^ble the Earl of Nottingham, his Maj^ties Principal Secretary of State at Whitehall."
He was sincere in those declarations, no doubt; but they show how completely he could blind himself to the past and even to the actual present. Mr. Peirce explains why the Corporation were so resolute in withholding their suffrages from Mather: "His contemporaries appear to have formed a very correct estimate of his character."
Cotton Mather preached one at the funeral of Fitz-John Winthrop in 1707, and another at the funeral of Waitstill Winthrop in 1717. Gradually there crept in the custom of having suitable prayers at the house before the burial procession formed, the first instance being probably at the funeral of Pastor Adams, of Roxbury, in 1683.
"Such men seldom have leisure to sit quietly in a chair," said Grandfather. "We must make the best of such people as we have." As Cotton Mather was a very distinguished man, Grandfather took some pains to give the children a lively conception of his character.
The Governor was an illiterate person, but of generous, confiding, and susceptible impulses; and the elder Mather was precisely fitted to acquire an ascendency over such a character.
These men, or many of them, were deeply- learned Calvinists, according to the standard of their day, a day lasting from, say, the Restoration to 1730. Cotton Mather, in particular, is erudite, literary nay, full of literary vanity mystical, visionary, credulous to an amusing degree. But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish correspondent and counterpart, Wodrow.
Consisting of specifications, in detail, if there had been in it the minutest item that could have admitted contradiction, it would have been seized upon, and used with the utmost eagerness to break the force of the statement. It was printed at London, in 1700, in a volume accredited there, and immediately put into circulation here, twenty-eight years before the death of Mather.
But though she was breythin' hard loike a grampus, she didn't spake nothin'! "`What's the mather, my good woman? says Mahony, going up to her an' spaking kindly to the poor crayture. `Let me feel your pulse. "He caught hold of her hand, which hung down the side of the chere and fumbled at the wrist for some toime, the ould woman starin' an' sayin' nothin' at all at all!
"Captain, there is a fine breeze blowing, it is a pity not to use it." "Make all ready, sir," replied the Captain. Then turning to the minister, "There is no particular hurry, Master Mather. You can take the night to think over it. To-morrow morning probably, if you come to your senses, we may be able to send you ashore somewhere, between here and the capes of the Delaware."
The leaders of the migration were substantial and hard-headed laymen like Winthrop and Dudley, and able and conscientious clergymen such as Cotton, Norton and Wilson, Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and Richard Mather.
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