the most important is the _Magnalia_, 1702, an ecclesiastical history
of New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: I.
Antiquities; II. Lives of the Governors; III. Lives of Sixty Famous
Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, with biographies of its
eminent graduates; V. Acts and Monuments of the Faith; VI. Wonderful
Providences; VII. The Wars of the Lord--that is, an account of the
Afflictions and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts with the
Indians. The plan of the work thus united that of Fuller's _Worthies
of England_ and _Church History_ with that of Wood's _Athenae
Oxonienses_ and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_.

Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Commonwealth writers
used. He was younger by a generation than Dryden; but, as literary
fashions are slower to change in a colony than in the mother-country,
that nimble English which Dryden and the Restoration essayists
introduced had not yet displaced in New England the older manner.
Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Brown,
Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with
allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the
Greek and the Latin. A page of the _Magnalia_ is almost as richly
mottled with italics as one from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and the
quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself
in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his
books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having "_angled_
many scores of souls into the kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs.
Hutchinson's surname into "the non-such;" and having occasion to speak
of Mr. Urian Oakes's election to the presidency of Harvard College,
enlarges upon the circumstance as follows:

"We all know that _Britain_ knew nothing more famous than their ancient