We may to-day turn to the _Magnalia_ for vivid accounts of early New
England life. Mather has a way of selecting and expressing facts in such a
way as to cause them to lodge in the memory. These two facts about John
Cotton give us a vivid impression of the influence of the early clergy:--

"The keeper of the inn where he did use to lodge, when he came to Derby,
would profanely say to his companions, that he wished Mr. Cotton were
gone out of his house, for he was not able to swear while that man was
under his roof....

"The Sabbath he began the evening before, for which keeping of the
Sabbath from evening to evening he wrote arguments before his coming to
New England; and I suppose 'twas from his reason and practice that the
Christians of New England have generally done so too."

We read that the daily vocation of Thomas Shepard, the first pastor at
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was, to quote Mather's noble phrase, "_A
Trembling Walk with God_" He speaks of the choleric disposition of Thomas
Hooker, the great Hartford clergyman, and says it was "useful unto him,"
because "he had ordinarily as much government of his choler as a man has of
a mastiff dog in a chain; he 'could let out his dog, and pull in his dog,
as he pleased.'" Some of Mather's prose causes modern readers to wonder if
he was not a humorist. He says that a fire in the college buildings in some
mysterious way influenced the President of Harvard to shorten one of his
long prayers, and gravely adds, "that if the devotions had held three
minutes longer, the Colledge had been irrecoverably laid in ashes." One
does not feel sure that Mather saw the humor in this demonstration of
practical religion. It is also doubtful whether he is intentionally
humorous in his most fantastic prose, such, for instance, as his likening