the Rev. Mr. Partridge to the bird of that name, who, because he "had no
defence neither of beak nor claw," took "a flight over the ocean" to escape
his ecclesiastical hunters, and finally "took wing to become a bird of
paradise, along with the winged seraphim of heaven."

Such fantastic conceits, which for a period blighted the literature of the
leading European nations, had their last great exponent in Cotton Mather.
Minor writers still indulge in these conceits, and find willing readers
among the uneducated, the tired, and those who are bored when they are
required to do more than skim the surface of things. John Seccomb, a
Harvard graduate of 1728, the year in which Mather died, then gained fame
from such lines as:--

"A furrowed brow,
Where corn might grow,"

but the best prose and poetry have for a long time won their readers for
other qualities. Even the taste of the next generation showed a change, for
Cotton Mather's son, Samuel, noted as a blemish his father's "straining for
far-fetched and dear-bought hints." Cotton Mather's most repellent habit to
modern readers is his overloading his pages with quotations in foreign
languages, especially in Latin. He thus makes a pedantic display of his
wide reading.

He is not always accurate in his presentation of historical or biographical
matter, but in spite of all that can be said against the _Magnalia_, it is
a vigorous presentation of much that we should not willingly let die. In
fact, when we read the early history of New England, we are frequently
getting from the _Magnalia_ many things in changed form without ever
suspecting the source.