The governor of Virginia in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, Sir William Berkeley, was a high-handed autocrat whose character is well illustrated in his reply to the Commissioners of Plantations (1671) when they asked: “What course is taken about the instructing the people within your government in the Christian religion?" Berkeley answered: "The same course that is taken in England out of towns, every man according to his ability instructing his children. We have forty-eight parishes, and our ministers are well paid, and by my consent should be better if they would pray oftener and preach less. But of all other commodities, so of this, the worst are sent us, and we had few that we could boast of, since the persecution in Cromwell's tyranny drove divers worthy men hither. But, I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!" Berkeley's almost absolute power was exerted in favor of wealthy land-owners, and justly aroused popular discontent. Nathaniel Bacon, a young planter on the western frontier of Virginia, was in 1676 suddenly elevated by events and the action of the governor into the position of a popular leader. In that year his plantation was attacked by Indians, who killed one of his men. He at once led a successful expedition against the Indians, but was at the same time practically denounced a rebel by Berkeley, for assuming military command without authority. This was the beginning of what is usually called "Bacon's Rebellion." (The best modern account is in H. L. Osgood's American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, III, Chap. viii.) It provoked a popular outcry and led to important but abortive political reforms. Bacon assumed the character of a revolutionary leader, was on the whole successful, and, possibly, began to entertain the notion of forming Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina into an independent commonwealth. But, before the close of 1676, he was stricken with illness which caused his death, after which the "rebellion" quickly subsided.

The Burwell Papers, so called because the manuscript was owned by the Burwell family in the early part of the nineteenth century, contain an account of Bacon's Rebellion by an unknown hand. The writer probably composed his narrative not long after 1676, and he wrote in sympathy with Berkeley. In recounting the manner of Bacon's death he quoted "a cuple" of poems written upon the event, one of which is the Epitaph printed below. All that we know concerning its author is contained in this introductory sentence: After he was dead he was bemoned in these following lines (drawne by the Man that waited upon his person, as it is said) and who attended his Corps to there Buriall place." Whoever the author, he was a genuine poet and, probably, a discerning student of Ben Jonson. He "produced what is perhaps the one real American poem of the seventeenth century." (S. M. Tucker, Camb. Hist. Am. Lit., I, 150.) For other American verse written before the time of Philip Freneau, Mr. P. E. More has said, with disarming sympathy, all that can be said, in his essay entitled The Spirit and Poetry of Early New England (reprinted in the second part of this work). Briefly, there was no American poet save "Bacon's Man" before the latter half of the eighteenth century.

The Epitaph was first printed in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1814. The copy then used was inaccurate. It was again printed, from the manuscript, in the Proceedings of the same Society in 1866, and the present reprint follows this text, save for the correction of one or two obvious slips. Punctuation, however, has been modernized.

way

DEATH, Why so crewill? What, no other
To manifest thy splleene but thus to slay
Our hopes of safety, liberty, our all
Which, through thy tyrany, with him must
fall

To its late Caoss? Had thy riged force
Bin delt by retale, and not thus in gross,

Griefe had bin silent. Now, wee must com-
plaine.

Since thou in him hast more then thousand slane,

Whose lives and safetys did so much depend On him there1 lif, with him there lives must end.

IO

If 't be a sin to thinke Death brib'd can bee,

Wee must be guilty-say twas bribery

1 Their (as also elsewhere in the poem).

COTTON MATHER (1663-1728)

Cotton Mather's father was Increase Mather (1639-1723), his grandfathers Richard Mather (15961669) and John Cotton (1585–1652). These men were the very center and interior stronghold of the Puritan theocracy of New England's early years. The Puritans came to the American wilderness for freedom of worship. The idea of religious toleration had scarcely made its appearance in the world in the early part of the seventeenth century, and the Puritans aimed at freedom—not for all people and all beliefs-but for themselves. Their efforts to secure the absolute sway of their own religion in a commonwealth constructed and governed to that end were commensurate with the depth of earnest conviction which had driven them out of the civilized world. What was their religion? Barrett Wendell, in his life of Cotton Mather (1891, reprinted 1926), has admirably summarized the Puritan creed out of Book V of the Magnalia Christi Americana: "In the beginning God created man, responsible to Him, with perfect freedom of will. Adam, in the fall, exerted his will in opposition to the will of God: thereby Adam and all his posterity merited eternal punishment. As a mark of that punishment they lost the power of exerting the will in harmony with the will of God, without losing their hereditary responsibility to Him. But God, in His infinite mercy, was pleased to mitigate His justice. Through the mediation of Christ, certain human beings, chosen at God's pleasure, might be relieved of the just penalty of sin, and received into everlasting salvation. These were the elect: none others could be saved, nor could any acts of the elect impair their salvation. Now there were no outward and visible marks by which the elect might be known: there was a fair chance, then, that any human being to whom the Gospel was brought might be of the number. The thing that most vitally concerned every man, then, was to discover whether he were elect, and so free from the just penalty of sin, ancestral and personal. The test of election was ability to exert the will in true harmony with the will of God-a proof of emancipation from the hereditary curse of the children of Adam: whoever could ever do right, and want to, had a fair ground for hope that he should be saved. But even the elect were infected with the hereditary sin of humanity; and, besides, no wile of the Devil was more frequent than that which deceived men into believing themselves regenerate when in truth they were not. The task of assuring one's self of election, then, could end only with life—a life of passionate aspirations, ecstatic enthusiasms, profound discouragements. Above all, men must never forget that the true will of God was revealed, directly or by implication, only and wholly in Scripture: incessant study of Scripture, then, was the sole means by which any man could assure himself that his will was really exerting itself, through the mediatory power of Christ, in true harmony with the will of God."

Passionately the Puritans worked to fashion a community devoted to an other-worldly end thus defined; and Mather's life of Winthrop is sufficient testimony that enlightened and noble men threw themselves into the effort. No pains were spared. Godly exhortation was poured forth in floods. Every aspect of life was piously supervised. Men and women of different beliefs were relentlessly persecuted and driven away. Evil spirits and the witches through whom they were thought to work were tracked down-the witches killed, the spirits, so far as might be, banished. Harvard College was founded to bring up new generations of ministers in the true faith. And yet-it was all in the end to no avail. Individual free thought was implanted in the heart of Protestantism, and the spirit of worldliness, howsoever individuals might precariously triumph over it, could not be banished from a community which soon began to grow prosperous. The lives of Increase and Cotton Mather were a prolonged but always losing struggle to maintain the pure faith of the first generation of settlers.

Cotton Mather was born in Boston, was graduated from Harvard, a learned youth, in 1678, and was pastor of the North Church in Boston from 1685 until his death. During all save the last five years of this period he was associated in the pastorate with his father. He read everything that came within his reach and wrote incessantly, living a life of almost unbelievable industry, as well as devotion, in support of Puritanism. But, even so, his religious work did not exhaust all of his energy. For his scientific attainments procured his election to the Royal Society, and he was a pioneer in the advocacy of inoculation against the small-pox. This should be remembered when we hear him abused, as he still is, for sharing the belief, almost universal in his day, in the powers of witches, and for taking part in the Salem witchcraft trials.

Mather published more than four hundred books, and left others in manuscript. Many of these are sermons. Of the others, the three which remain best known are: The Wonders of the Invisible

World: Observations upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of the Devils (1693); Essays to Do Good (at first entitled Bonifacius, 1710); and the Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), from which two selections are here printed. This, Mather's most ambitious literary performance, was written to preserve the memory of New England's heroic Puritan days, with the hope that readers might be fired to emulate the great examples therein delineated. It was, in truth, one of the many unavailing efforts with which Mather's days were filled to preserve the old order and its faith. In the General Introduction, directed to Englishmen (the book was published in England), we read: “It may be, 't is not possible for me to do a greater service unto the Churches on the best Island of the universe, than to give a distinct relation of these great examples which have been occurring among Churches of exiles, that were driven out of that Island into an horrible wilderness, merely for their being well-wishers unto the Reformation. . . . T is possible that our Lord Jesus Christ carried some thousands of Reformers into the retirements of an American desert on purpose that, with an opportunity granted unto many of his faithful servants to enjoy the precious liberty of their Ministry, though in the midst of many temptations all their days, He might there, to them first, and then by them, give a specimen of many good things which He would have His Churches elsewhere aspire and arise unto."

Wendell, after mentioning the haste in which this book was evidently written, its imperfections of design, its many small errors, and the like, goes on to say: "For all this, the Magnalia has merits which dispose me to rate it among the great works of English literature in the seventeenth century. The style, in the first place, seems to me remarkably good. Any one can detect its faults at a glance: it is prolix, often overloaded with pedantic quotation, now and then fantastic in its conceits. But these were faults of Mather's time. And he has two merits peculiarly his own: in the whole book I have not found a line that is not perfectly lucid, nor many paragraphs that, considering the frequent dullness of his subject, I could honestly call tiresome. In the second place, admitting once for all every charge of inaccurate detail, I am inclined to think the veracity of spirit that pervades the book of very high order. Somehow, as no one else can, Cotton Mather makes you by and by feel what the Puritan ideal was: if he does not tell just what men were, he does tell just what they wanted to be, and what loyal posterity longed to believe them. In the third place, not even the sustained monotony of his style and temper can prevent one who reads with care from recognizing the marked individuality of his separate portraits."

renowned commonwealth: let Rome tell of her devout Numa, the lawgiver, by whom the most famous commonwealth saw peace triumphing over extinguished war and cruel plunders, and murders giving place to the more mollifying exercises of his religion. Our New England shall tell and boast of her WINTHROP, a lawgiver as patient as Lycurgus, but not admitting any of his criminal disorders; as devout as Numa, but not liable to any of his heathenish madnesses; a governor in whom the excellencies of Christianity made a most improving addition unto the virtues, wherein even without those he would have made a parallel for the great men of Greece, or of Rome, which the pen of a Plutarch has eternized.

2. A stock of heroes by right should afford nothing but what is heroical; and nothing but an extreme degeneracy would make any thing less to be expected from a stock of Winthrops. Mr. Adam Winthrop, the son of a worthy gentleman wearing the same name, was himself a worthy, a discreet, and a learned gentleman, particularly eminent for skill in the law, nor without remark for love to the Gospel, under the reign of King