Page:Varia.djvu/68

when people moped in corners over their own or their neighbors' shortcomings; and there is no more curious contrast offered by the wide world of book-land than the life reflected so faithfully in Pepys's diary and in the sombre journal of Judge Sewall. New England is as visible in the one book as is Old England in the other,—New England under the bleak sky of an austere, inexorable, uncompromising Puritanism which dominated every incident of life. If Mr. Pepys went to see a man hanged at Tyburn, the occasion was one of some jollity, alike for crowd and for criminal; an open-air entertainment, in which the leading actor was recompensed in some measure for the severity of his part by the excitement and admiration he aroused. But when Judge Sewall attended the execution of James Morgan, the unfortunate prisoner was first carried into church, and prayed over lengthily by Cotton Mather for the edification of the congregation, who came in such numbers and pressed in such unruly fashion around the pulpit that a riot took place within the holy walls, and Morgan was near dying of suffocation in the dullest possible manner without the gallows-tree.