this very place was called _Oyye_, which
was the name of _Noah_, so styled from the _Oggyan_ (_subcineritiis
panibus_) sacrifices, which he did use to offer in this renowned
_Grove_. And it was from this example that the ancients and
particularly that the Druids of the nations, chose _oaken_ retirements
for their studies. Reader, let us now, upon another account, behold
the students of _Harvard College_, as a rendezvous of happy _Druids_,
under the influences of so rare a president. But, alas! our joy must
be short-lived, for on _July_ 25, 1681, the stroke of a sudden death
felled the _tree_,

"Qui tantum inter caput extulit omnes
Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cypressi.

"Mr. _Oakes_ thus being transplanted into the better world, the
presidentship was immediately tendered unto _Mr. Increase Mather_."

This will suffice as an example of the bad taste and laborious pedantry
which disfigured Mather's writing. In its substance the book is a
perfect thesaurus; and inasmuch as nothing is unimportant in the
history of the beginnings of such a nation as this is and is destined
to be, the _Magnalia_ will always remain a valuable and interesting
work. {351} Cotton Mather, born in 1663, was of the second generation
of Americans, his grandfather being of the immigration, but his father
a native of Dorchester, Mass. A comparison of his writings and of the
writings of his contemporaries with the works of Bradford, Winthrop,
Hooker, and others of the original colonists, shows that the simple and
heroic faith of the Pilgrims had hardened into formalism and doctrinal
rigidity. The leaders of the Puritan exodus, notwithstanding their
intolerance of errors in belief, were comparatively broad-minded men.
They were sharers in a great national movement, and they came over when
their cause was warm with the glow of martyrdom and on the eve of its
coming triumph at home. After the Restoration, in 1660, the currents
of national feeling no longer circulated so freely through this distant
member of the body politic, and thought in America became more
provincial. The English dissenters, though socially at a disadvantage
as compared with the Church of England, had the great benefit of living
at the center of national life, and of feeling about them the pressure
of vast bodies of people who did not think as they did. In New
England, for many generations, the dominant sect had things all its own
way, a condition of things which