WENDELL'S "COTTON MATHER"
while leaving that so manifestly to speak for itself. But Professor Wendell usually remembers that he holds a brief for his subject, and discharges his trust becomingly.
Indeed, the distinctive result of his labor is that he has shown Cotton Mather not alone as history thus far has shown him: not merely, on the one side, as the most loquacious pedant, yet in truth most learned scholar, of his time; not merely as the egotist, the mystic, the theocrat, the promoter of the Salem trials; nor yet merely as the author of that unique, quaintly inclusive, survey of his compeers without which none can fully comprehend the early and middle colonial periods; but he has set before us a man who may in justice be absolved from the charge of obstinate bad faith and concealed recognition of terrible mistakes. He has taken us into Dr. Mather's sanctuary and patiently laid bare the chambers of his heart, wherein even his unfaltering credulity invests him with something like heroism. He has conceived of the Puritan priest as sincere to the last, as one who died a good man, going to his grave stricken but not cast down. It was "a good man," he enables the reader also to believe, "whom they buried on Copp's Hill one February day in the year 1728," just as he had rounded the sixty-fifth year of a defiantly militant pilgrimage.
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