is not healthy for any sect or party.
Hence Mather and the divines of his time appear in their writings very
much like so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives,
magnifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their {352}
authority over the laity. Mather had an appetite for the marvelous,
and took a leading part in the witchcraft trials, of which he gave an
account in his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, 1693. To the quaint
pages of the Magnalia our modern authors have resorted as to a
collection of romances or fairy tales. Whittier, for example, took
from thence the subject of his poem _The Garrison of Cape Anne_; and
Hawthorne embodied in _Grandfather's Chair_ the most elaborate of
Mather's biographies. This was the life of Sir William Phipps, who,
from being a poor shepherd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to
be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose
wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish treasure ship,
sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than
like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and
plate and jewels and "pieces of eight."

Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice of
Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is
intimately known through his Diary kept from 1673 to 1729. This has
been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, which it
resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its
self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historic
interest as "the petty province here" was inferior in political and
social importance to "Britain far away." For the most part it is a
chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae {353} of
his domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such
haps as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret." But it also
affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip's
War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc. It
bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of
the seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's journals bear to
that of the first generation. Sewall was one of the justices who
presided at the trial of the Salem witches; but for the part which he
took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible, by
open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of