law, the peine forte et dure. Mather was on the spot, aiding and abetting, "riding in the whirlwind, and directing the storm." At the execution of the clergyman, George Burroughs, he was present among the crowd on horseback, addressing the people, and cavilling at the ordination of his brother pastor.* His Wonders of the Invisible World; being an account of the trial of several witches lately executed in New England,† tells the story of these melancholy judicial crimes, with a hearty unction which gloats over the victims. His faith is as unrelenting as the zeal of an antiquarian or a virtuo30. His spiritual rant, forgetting the appropriate language of the scholar and the divine, anticipates the burlesque of a Maw-worm, or the ravings of a Mucklewrath. When the witch mania had run out, having brought itself to a reductio ad absurdum, by venting suspicions of the diabolical agencies of the wife of Governor Phips, which was carrying the matter quite too far, and Robert Calef had published his spirited exposure of the affair in 1700, Mather repeating the stories in the old strain in the Magnalia, makes no retraction of his former judgments or convictions. In 1723, in the chapter of the "Remarkables" of his father, entitled Troubles from the Invisible World, he repeats the absurd stories of the "prodigious possession of devils" at Salem.g Bancroft's U. S. fii. 92. The Wonders of the Invisible World; being an account of the Tryals of Several Witches, lately executed in New England, and of several remarkable curiosities therein occurring. To gether with, 1. Observations upon the nature, the number, and the operations of the Devils. 2. A short narrative of a late outrage committed by a knot of witches in Swedeland, very much resembling, and so far explaining, that under which New England has labored. 3. Some councils directing a due improvement of the terrible things lately done by the unusual and amazing Range of Evil Spirits in New England. 4. A brief discourse upon those Temptations which are the more ordinary Devices of Satan, by Cotton Mather. Published by the special command of his Excellency the Governor of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England. Printed first at Boston, in New England; and reprinted at London, for John Dunton, at the Raven, in the Poultry, 1693. 4to. pp. 9S. More Wonders of the Invisible World; or the Wonders of the Invisible World Displayed in five parts. An account of the sufferings of Margaret Rule, collected by Robert Calef, merchant of Boston, in New England. London, 1700. Calef's book, on its arrival in this country, was publicly burnt by the Mather agency, in the college yard at Cambridge. Samuel Mather, in the Life of his Father (p. 46), disposes of it more summarily than posterity is willing to do. "There was a certain disbeliever of witchcraft, who wrote against this book; but as the man is dead, his book died long before him." This merchant of Boston deserves to be well remembered for his independence and acuteness. He is deserving of more special notice than he has received. He died in 1720. The witchcraft executions had been the work of a few clergymen and their friends in office, and had been carried through by a special court got up among them for the occasion. Bancroft (iii. 8) assigns the responsibility of the tragedy" to the very few, hardly five or six, in whose hands the transition state of the government left, for a season, unlimited influence." When Mr. Upham published his Lectures on this subject, he was called upon by a writer in the public prints, to make good his charge against Cotton Mather, of having exerted him. self to increase and extend the frenzy of the public mind. He produced in reply, an original letter froin Dr. Mather to Stephen Sewall, of Salem, in which he manifests an excessive earnestness to prevent the excitement from subsiding. This was written in September, after the summer which had witnessed the executions in Salem, and contained an importunate request, that Mr. Sewall would furnish him with the evidence given at the trials. Imagine me as obdurate a Sadducee and witch-advocate as any among us; address me as one that believed nothing reasonable; and when you have so knocked me down, in a spectre so unlike me, you will enable me to box it about among my neighbors till it come. I know not where at last." Peabody's Life, 249. Chandler Robbins, in his History of the Second Church, or Old North in Boston, has taken an apologetic view of these transactions, and exempted Mather from the charge of conscious deception. "He may be called a fool for his credulity; but he certainly cannot be called a knave for his The lesson, however, was not without profit to him. When a great humanitarian question, which he was the first to introduce, afterwards came up, in the year 1721, the new discovery of the inoculation for the small-pox, and the superstitious feeling of the day was opposed to it, Mather set himself against the popular outcry on the side of the reform.* It was in vain now that his opponents brought up the diabolical agencies of the new remedy. Mather had chosen the other side, and the wicked suggestions of the spiritual world were silenced. It was a noble position for a man to hold, and he resolutely maintained it. Even as all scandal touching the fair Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is forgotten, when she is seen angelically bringing this protection for humanity from Turkey to England, so may the bigotry and superstition of Mather be overlooked when, not waiting for English precedents, he took upon himself the introduction of this new remedy in America. In many other respects, Mather's memory deserves to be held in esteem by the present generation. He carried about with him that indefatigable sense of usefulness which we associate with the popular memory of Franklin, whose character doubtless he helped to mould. The philosopher in his autobiography, acknowledges his obligations to Dr. Mather, in a paragraph in which he associates the Essays to do good with a book by De Foe as "perhaps giving him a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of his life." He has left another memorandum of this obligation in a letter to Samuel Mather, from Passey, May 12, 1784:-" When I was a boy, I met with a book, entitled Essays to do Good,' which I think was written by your father. It had been so little regarded by its former possessor, that several leaves of it were torn out; but the remainder gave me such a turn of thinking, as to have an influence on my conduct through life.”† cunning," p. 102. Quincy has handled Mather less mildly in his History of Harv. Univ. i. 346. An interesting and instructive history of the introduction of inoculation into New England, will be found in Mr. W. B. O. Peabody's Life of Cotton Mather, in volume iv. of Sparks's American Biography. "The clergy, who were generally in favor of inoculation, supported it by arguments drawn from medical science; while the physicians, who were as much united against it, opposed it with arguments which were chiefly theological, alleging that it was presumptuous in man to inflict disease on man, that being the prerogative of the Most High." Dr. Zabdiel Boylston stood alone in the faculty. He defended inoculation by his pen, and promoted it by his example. Dr. Douglass, a Scotchman, a physician of note in Boston, and afterwards the author of "A Summary, Historical and Political, of the British Settlements in North America," 1760, was an indignant opponent. This letter also preserves an anecdote characteristic of both parties-the theoretical Cotton Mather, and the practical Franklin. "You mention your being in your seventyeighth year. I am in my seventy-ninth. We are grown old together. It is now more than sixty years since I left Boston: but I remember well both your father and grandfather, having heard them both in the pulpit, and seen them in their houses. The last time I saw your father was in the beginning of 1724, when I visited him after my first trip to Pennsylvania; he received me in his library, and on my taking leave, showed me a shorter way out of the house, through a narrow passage, crossed by a beam over head. We were still talking as I with-drew, he accompanying me behind, and I turning partly towards him, when he said hastily, Stoop, stoop! I did not understand him, till I felt my head hit against the beam. He was a man who never missed any occasion of giving instruction; and upon this he said to me, 'You are young, and have the world before you: stoop as you go through it, and you wil miss many hard thumps. This advice, thus beat into my head, has frequently been of use to me; and I often think of it, when I see pride mortified, and misfortunes brought upon people by their carrying their heads too high." Mather was always exercising his ingenuity to contribute something useful to the world. He was one of the first to employ the press extensively in the dissemination of tracts; he early lifted his voice in favor of temperance; he preached and wrote for sailors; he instructed negroes; he substituted moral and sagacious intellectual restraints with his children for flogging;* conversation he studied and practised as an art; and he was a devoted historiographer of his country for posterity-besides his paramount employment, according to the full measure of his day and generation, of discharging the sacred duties of his profession. Pity that any personal defects of temperament or "follies of the wise" should counterbalance these noble achievements--that so well freighted a bark should at times experience the want of a rudder. Good sense was the one stick occasionally missing from the enormous faggot of Mather's studies and opinions. The remark that Mather made of one of the many opinionists of the times, whose notions did not agree with his own, or whose nonsense, to reverse the saying of Charles II. of Bishop Woolly and the non-conformists, did not suit his nonsense, that his brain was a windmill, may be applied to himself. He was full of a restless, uneasy mental action. He wrote history without being an historian, and painted character without being a biographer. But he had a great genius for the odd and the fantastic. One thing he never could attain, though he nearly inherited it, though his learning almost irresistibly challenged it, though he spiritually anticipated it-the prize of the presidency of Harvard College. One and another was chosen in preference to him. The ghostly authority of the old priestly influence was passing away. Cotton Mather was, in age, a disheartened and disappointed man. The possession, in turn, of three wives had proved but a partial consolation. One of his sons he felt compelled to disown;t his wife was subject to fits of temper bordering on insanity; the glooms of his own disposition grew darker in age as death approached, a friend whom he was glad to meet, when he expired, at the completion of his sixty-fifth year, the 13th February, 1728. His last emphatic charge to his son Samuel was, "Remember only that one word, 'Fructuosus.'" It was a word which had never been forgotten by himself-for his genius had indeed borne much fruit. The catalogue of his printed works enumerated by his son Samuel, at the close of the life *The kind and shrewd disposition of Mather in this particular is worthy of special mention. "He would have his children account it a privilege to be taught; and would sometimes manage the matter so, that refusing to teach them something should be looked upon as a punishment. The strain of his threatenings therefore was: you shall not be allowed to read, or to write, or to learn such a thing, if you do not as I have bidden you. The slavish way of education, carried on with raving, and kicking, and scourging (in schools as well as families) he looked upon as a dreadful judgment of God on the world; he thought the practice abominable, and expressed a mortal aversion to it."-Life by Samuel Mather, p. 17. + His Diary speaks of his "miserable son," and threatens "a tremendous letter to my wicked son." Samuel Mather, his brother, writes kindly of him:-"The third son was Increase, a young man, well beloved by all who knew him for his superior good nature and manners, his elegant wit and ready expressions. He went to sea, and on his passage from Barbadoes to Newfoundland was lost in the Atlantic."-Life of Cotton Mather, p. 14. of his father, which supplied us with so many characteristic traits of the man,* numbers three hundred and eighty-two, a Cottonian library in itself, bearing date during more than forty years, from 1686 to 1727. As an ancient Roman Emperor took for his adage, “nulla dies sine lineâ," so Cotton Mather may be said to have enlarged the motto, 66 no year without a book," for in the ripe period of his book productiveness, not a date is missing. These publications were, many of them, light, and occasional tracts, single sermons, and the like; but there were many among them of sufficient magnitude, and all were greatly condensed. The famous sentence which he wrote in capitals over his study door, as a warning to all tedious and impertinent visitors, "Be short," he bore in mind himself for his own writings when he approached that much enduring host, the public. Books and reading were his delight: he was one of the old folio race of scholars, the gluttons of ancient authors, transplanted to America. The vigorous pedantic school which grew up under the shade of Harvard, in those days, between the wilderness and the sea, was a remarkable feature of the times. Warmly writes poetical John Adams, of Newport, of Mather's productiveness. What numerous volumes scatter'd from his hand, In one of Mather's private thanksgivings, he records his gratitude for the usual rewards of a pastor's ministry, and adds as special items of happiness, "my accomplishments in any points of learning my well furnished library.” On another occasion, he describes the culture of his genius: "I am not unable, with a little study, to write in seven languages: I feast myself with the secrets of all the sciences which the more polite An Life of the Very Reverend and learned Cotton Mather, D.D. and F.R.S., late Pastor of the North Church, in Boston; who died Feb. 18, 1727-8, by Samuel Mather, M.A., Boston. Printed for Samuel Gerrish, in Cornhill, 1729. 12mo. pp. 186. abridgment of this life was published in London, 1744, by David Jennings, at the suggestion of Dr. Watts, who speaks in his "Recommendation" of his "happy Correspondence with the Reverend Dr. Cotton Mather, for near twenty years before his death as well as with the Reverend Mr. Samuel Mather, his son, ever since. I found much of his learned and pious character very early, from the spirit of his Letters, and of his public writings, which he favored me with every year." Large as this catalogue is, and carefully prepared by his son, it does not include all Mather's publications. Extensive collections of them may be found in the Library of the Ameri can Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which has also a Mather alcove of weather-beaten divinity in ragged black covers, as if smoked by the fires of the Inquisition,-hardly one has a label left-rich in such old time works as the "Church Politics" of Voetius, the "Scholastical Divinity" of Henry Jeanes. Bilson's "Christian Subjections," Sib's Pious Writings, relieved by an old Latin volume of Henry More, of Erasmus, and a few broken sets of Roman poets. Books which once belonged to grandfather, father, son, and grandson, Richard, Increase, Cotton, and Samuel. There are fifty-two Cotton Mather items on the catalogue of the Boston Athenæum. The Mather MSS. are chiefly in the archives of the Mass. Historical Society, and the American Antiq. Society. On the Death of Dr. Cotton Mather, Poems, p. 85. part of mankind ordinarily pretend unto. I am entertained with all kinds of histories, ancient and modern. I am no stranger to the curiosities, which by all sorts of learning are brought unto the curious. These intellectual pleasures are far beyond my sensual ones."* The great work of Mather, to which many of his writings are properly appendices, the Magnalia Christi Americana, is a monument of these studies. In its plan it is a compound of quaint❘ English Dr. Thomas Fuller's Church History and Worthies; but in the execution, the wit and sagacity of the American are not of so fine an edge, and the poetical fancy is missing. The book purports, on its title-page, to be The Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first Planting in the year 1620, unto the year of our Lord 1698; but includes also the civil history of the times, an account of Harvard college, of the Indian wars, of the witchcraft "troubles," together with the lives of more than eighty individuals, celebrities of church and state. By the year 1718 Mather had published the lives of no less than one hundred and fourteen men and twenty women, and more, says his biographer, afterwards, "not to say anything of the transient but honorable mention many others have had in the doctor's tractates." Character painting, in funeral sermons and eulogies, was one of the strong points of Mather's genius, an exercise of amiability which the poet Halleck has kindly remembered among the verses in which he has so happily depicted the peculiarities of the man: O Genius! powerful with thy praise or blame, When art thou feigning? when art thou sincere? Mather, who banned his living friends with shame, In funeral sermons blessed them on their bier, And made their deathbeds beautiful with fameFame true and gracious as a widow's tear To her departed darling husband given; Him whom she scolded up from earth to heaven. Thanks for his funeral sermons, they recall The sunshine smiling through his folio's leaves, That makes his readers' hours in bower or hall Joyous as plighted hearts on bridal eves; Chasing, like music from the soul of Saul, The doubt that darkens, and the ill that grieves; And honoring the author's heart and mind, That beats to bless, and toils to ennoble human kind.† The Magnalia was printed in London, in folio, in 1702, through the agency of a friend, Mr. Robert Hackshaw, who bore the expense as an act of faith. It was not till 1820 that it was reprinted in America, at Hartford. As an historical work its incidental lights are more valuable than its direct opinions; its credulity and prejudice are unbounded, but they painfully exhibit the management of the old ecclesiasticism of New England; for the rest, its vigorous oddity of expression is amusing, and will long attract the curious reader. Giving Mather every credit for sincerity, his judgment appears sadly at fault: the mixture of high intentions with low puerilities recalls to us the exclamation of Coleridge upon perusing a book of the same school, John Reynolds's old folio of God's Revenge against Murther, "Oh, what a beautiful concordia discordantium is an unthinking, good-hearted man's soul." The book of Mather's which is mentioned most frequently after the Magnalia, is the Christian Philosopher, a collection of Natural Theology instances and improvements, leaning upon Boyle, Ray, Derham, and similar writers. Commencing with light, the planets, and such phenomena as snow, wind, cold, he travels through the mineral, vegetable, and animal world, to man, into whose anatomy he enters intimately. He quotes for poetry "the incomparable Sir Richard Blackmore," with whom he corresponded, and recognises "our ingenious Mr. Waller." The natural history is sometimes of the simplest, and the moral improvements are overdone. His pro totype, Boyle, in his Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects, had carried a good thing so far as to excite the humor of Swift, who wrote his Pious Meditation on a Broomstick, in parody of his style. Mather adopts the popular credulities touching the victim of the bite of the tarantula, and narrates them with great emotion; and he tells us, out of Beccone, that men, if need requires, may suckle infants from their breasts. His love for the curiosities of reading will carry him anywhere for an example. Thus he remarks, "What a sympathy between the feet and the bowels! the priests walking barefoot on the pavement of the temple, were often afflicted, as the Talmuds tell us, with diseases in the bowels. The physician of the temple was called a bowel doctor. Bellyaches, occasioned by walking on a cold floor, are cured by applying hot bricks to the soles of the feet." There is, however, an obvious good intention to be useful and devout everywhere. The Essays to do Good, an abridgment of which has been in popular circulation with "improvements" by George Burder, the author of the Village Sermons," may be best described by their original title, in the publication of 1710, "Bonifacius; an Essay upon the Good, that is to be devised and designed, by those who desire to answer the Great End of Life, and to do Good while they live. A Book offered, first, in General, unto all Christians, in a Personal Capacity, or in a relative: Then more particularly unto Magistrates, Ministers, Physicians, Lawyers, Schoolmasters, Gentlemen, Officers, Churches, and unto all Societies of a religious character and intention: with humble Proposals of unexceptionable methods to Do Good in the world." The treatment is ingenious, and the design affords a model for a wider treatment with reference to all the prominent arts and pursuits of life. Mather, too, sometimes, like so many of the worthies he celebrated, tried his hand upon poetry. Whether Minerva was willing or not, the verses must be produced. He has the gift of Holofernes for "smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention." But the puns and quibs which he has for others take a more natural form when he writes his own sorrows on the death of his son and daughter. The Psalterium Americanum, published in 1718, was an attempt to improve the careless version of the Psalms then current, by a translation exactly conformed to the original, and written in blank verse. Mr. Hood, in his History of Music, speaks of the work with respect. To the translations were appended brief devotional and learned comments, or, as the author more pointedly challenges attention to them-"Every Psalm is here satellited with illustrations, which are not fetched from the vulgar annotations, but are the more fine, deep, and uncommon thoughts, which in a course of long reading and thinking have been brought in the way of the collector. They are golden keys to immense treasures of Truth." Verily, Mather understood well the learned trick of displaying his literary wares.* This literal translation, "without any jingle of words at the end," is printed by Mather in the several metres, separated from prose by rules set upright in the solid paragraph. We quote one of them, restored to the form of poetry:— PSALM C. Now unto the eternal God Yield service with a shining joy With joyful acclamations come Know that th' eternal God, He's God, He made us, and we're His; We are His people, and we are With due confessions enter ye And unto generations doth His faithfulness endure. An immense unpublished MS. of Mather, his Illustrations of the Sacred Scriptures, is stored in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, where it is shown in six volumes folio, of rough-edged whity-brown foolscap, written in the author's round, exact hand, in double columns; its magnitude and forgotten theology bidding defiance to the enterprise of editors and publishers. Portions of his Diary, a painful psychological curiosity, are also to be found there, including the torn leaf from which the invisible hand of witchcraft plucked a piece, according to his declaration, before his eyes. AN HORTATORY AND NECESSARY ADDRESS, TO A COUNTRY NOW EXTRAORDINARILY ALARM'D BY THE WRATH OF THE DEVIL -FROM THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD. That the Devil is come down unto us with great wrath, we find, we feel, we now deplore. In many ways, for many years, hath the Devil been assaying to extirpate the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus here. New England may complain of the Devil, as in Psalm exxix. 1, 2: Many a time have they afflicted me, from my youth, may New England now say; many a time have they afflicted me from my youth; yet they * Some of his title-pages are exquisite. Brontologia Sacra is the name he gives to a few sermions on remarkable thunderstorms. The titles of several of these occasional publications are, Nails Fastened, or Proposals of Piety; Adversus Libertinos; An Essay on Evangelical Obedience; Theopolis Americana, An Essay on the Golden Street of the Holy City. have not prevailed against me. But now there is a more than ordinary affliction, with, which the Devil is Galling of us: and such an one as is indeed Unparallelable. The things confessed by Witches, and the things endured by Others, laid together, amount unto this account of our Affliction. The Devil, Exhibiting himself ordinarily as a small Black man, has decoy'd a fearful kot of proud, forward, ignorant, envious, and malicious creatures, to list themselves in his horrid Service, by entring their Names in a Book, by him tendered unto them. These Witches, whereof above a Score have now Confessed, and shown their Deeds, and some are noW tormented by the Devils, for Confessing, have met in Hellish Rendezvouz, wherein the Confessors do say, they have had their diabolical Sacraments, imitating the Baptism and the Supper of our Lord In these hellish meetings, these Monsters have associated themselves to do no less a thing than, To destroy the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, in these parts of the World; and in order hereunto, First they each of them have their Spectres, or Devils, commissioned by them and representing of them, to be the Engines of their Malice. By these wicked Spectres, they seize poor people about the country, with various and bloody Torments; and of those evidently Preternatural torments there are some have dy'd. They have bewitched some, even so far as to make Self-destroyers: and others are in many Towns here and there languishing under their Eril hands. The people thus afflicted, are miserably scratched, and bitten, so that the Marks are most visible to all the World, but the causes utterly invisible; and the same Invisible Furies do most visibly stick Pins into the bodies of the Afflicted, and scale them, and hideously distort, and disjoint all their members, besides a thousand other sorts of Plague, beyond these of any natural diseases which they give unto them. Yea, they sometimes drag the poor people out of their chambers, and carry them over Trees and Hills, for divers miles together. A large part of the persons tortured by these Diabolical Spectres, are horribly tempted by them, sometimes with fair promises, and sometimes with hard threatenings, but always with felt miseries, to sign the Devil's Laws in a Spectral Book laid before them; which two or three of these poor Sufferers, being by their tiresome sufferings overcome to do. they have immediately been released from all their miseries, and they appeared in Spectre then to Torture those that were before their fellow-sufferers. The Witches, which by their covenant with the Devil are become Owners of Spectres, are oftentimes by their own Spectres required and compelled to give their consent, for the molestation of some, which they had no mind otherwise to fall upon: and cruel depredations are then made upon the Vicinage. In the Prosecution of these Witchcrafts, among a thousand other unaccountable things, the Spectres have an odd faculty of cloathing the most substantial and corporeal Instruments of Torture, with Invisibility, while the wounds thereby given have been the most palpable things in the World; so that the Sufferers assaulted with Instruments of Iron, wholly unseen to the standers by, though, to their cost, seen by themselves, have, upon snatching, wrested the Instruments out of the Spectre's hands, and every one has then immediately not only beheld, but handled, an Iron Instrument taken by a Devil from a Neighbor. These wicked Spectres have proceeded so far, as to steal several quantities of Money from divers people, part of which Money has, before sufficient Spectators, been dropt out of the Air into the Hands of the Sufferers, while the Spectres have been urging them to subscribe their Covenant with Death. In such extravagant ways have these Wretches propounded, the Dragooning of as many as they can, into their own Combination, and the Destroying of others, with lingring, spreading, deadly diseases; till our Country should at last become too hot for us. Among the Ghastly Instances of the success which those Bloody Witches have had, we have seen even some of their own Children, so dedicated unto the Devil, that in their Infancy, it is found, the Imps have sucked them, and rendered them Venomous to a Prodigy. We have also seen the Devil's first battries upon the Town where the first Church of our Lord in this Colony was gathered, producing those distractions, which have almost ruin'd the Town. We have seen, likewise, the Plague reaching afterwards into the Towns far and near, where the Houses of good Men have the Devils filling of them with terrible vexations! This is the descent, which, it seems, the devil has now made upon us. But that which makes this descent the more formidable, is, The multitude and quality of Persons accused of an interest in this Witchcraft, by the Efficacy of the Spectres which take their name and shape upon them; causing very many good and wise men to fear, that many innocent, yea, and some virtuous persons, are, by the devils in this matter, imposed upon; that the devils have obtain'd the power to take on them the likeness of harmless people, and in that likeness to afflict other people, and be so abused by Præstigious Dæmons, that upon their look or touch, the afflicted shall be oddly affected. Arguments from the Providence of God, on the one side, and from our charity towards man on the other side, have made this now to become a most agitated Controversie among us. There is an Agony produced in the Minds of Men, lest the Devil should sham us with Devices, of perhaps a finer Thread, than was ever yet practised upon the World. The whole business is become hereupon so Snarled, and the determination of the Question one way or another, so dismal, that our Honourable Judges have a Room for Jehosaphat's Exclamation, We know not what to do! They have used, as Judges have heretofore done, the Spectral Evidences, to introduce their further Enquiries into the Lives of the persons accused; and they have thereupon, by the wonderful Providence of God, been so strengthened with other evidences, that some of the Witch Gang have been fairly Executed. But what shall be done, as to those against whom the evidence is chiefly founded in the dark world? Here they do solemnly demand our Addresses to the Father of Lights, on their behalf. But in the mean time, the Devil improves the Darkness of this Affair, to push us into a Blind Man's Buffet, and we are even ready to be sinfully, yea, hotly and madly, mauling one another in the dark. THE TARANTULA. FROM THE "CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER." What amazing effects follow on the bite of the tarantula! the patient is taken with an extreme difficulty of breathing, and heavy anguish of heart, a dismal sadness of mind, a voice querulous and sorrowful, and his eyes very much disturbed. When the violent symptoms which appear on the first day are over, a continual melancholy hangs about the person, till by dancing or singing, or change of air, the poisonous impressions are extirpated from the blood, and the fluid of the nerves; but this is a happiness that rarely happens; nay, Baglivi, this wicked spider's countryman, says, there is no expectation of ever being perfectly cured. Many of the poisoned are never well but among the graves, and in solitary places; and they lay themselves along VOL. I.-5 upon a bier as if they themselves were dead: like people in despair, they will throw themselves into a pit; women, otherwise chaste enough, cast away all modesty, and throw themselves into every indecent posture. There are some colours agreeable to them, others offensive, especially black; and if the attendants have their clothes of ungrateful colours, they must retire out of their sight. The music with the dancing which must be employed for their cure, continues three or four days; in this vigorous exercise they sigh, they are full of complaints; like persons in drink, they almost lose the right use of their understanding; they distinguish not their very parents from others in their treating of them, and scarce remember any thing that is past. Some during this exercise are much pleased with green boughs of reeds or vines, and wave them with their hands in the air, or dip them in the water, or bind them about their face or neck; others love to handle red cloths or naked swords. there are those who, upon a little intermission of the dancing, fall a digging of holes in the ground, which they fill with water, and then take a strange satisfaction in rolling there. When they begin to dance, they call for swords and act like fencers; sometimes they are for a looking-glass, but then they fetch many a deep sigh at beholding themselves. Their fancy sometimes leads them to rich clothes, to necklaces, to fineries and a variety of ornaments; and they are highly courteous to the bystanders that will gratify them with any of these things; they lay them very orderly about the place where the exercise is pursued, and in dancing please themselves with one or other of these things by turns, as their troubled imagination directs them. And THE LIFE OF MR. RALPH PARTRIDGE-FROM THE "MAGNALIA." When David was driven from his friends into the wilderness, he made this pathetical representation of his condition, ""Twas as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains." Among the many worthy persons who were persecuted into an American wilderness, for their fidelity to the ecclesiastical kingdom of our true David, there was one that bore the name as well as the state of an hunted partridge. What befel him, was, as Bede saith of what was done by Fælix, Juxta nominis sui Sacramentum. This was Mr. Ralph Partridge, who for no fault but the delicacy of his good spirit, being distressed by the ecclesiastical setters, had no defence, neither of beak nor claw, but a flight over the ocean. The place where he took covert was the colony of Plymouth, and the town of Duxbury in that colony. This Partridge had not only the innocency of the dove, conspicuous in his blameless and pious life, which made him very acceptable in his conversation, but also the loftiness of an eagle, in the great soar of his intellectual abilities. There are some interpreters who, understanding church officers by the living creatures, in the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse, will have the teacher to be intended by the eagle there, for his quick insight into remote and hidden things. The church of Duxbury had such an eagle in their Partridge, when they enjoyed such a teacher. By the same token, when the Platform of Church Discipline was to be composed, the Synod at Cambridge appointed three persons to draw up each of |