to increase in brilliancy with each generation. An old epitaph records that
The son was Increase Mather, renowned for learning and eloquence, president of Harvard College from 1685 to 1701, pastor of the old North Church until his death; while the grandson, the crowning glory of all, was Cotton Mather, "the literary behemoth of New England in our Colonial Era." No man was ever more fortunate in his ancestry. His maternal grandfather was the famous Boston divine, John Cotton. From his ancestors on both sides he inherited all the earnestness and obstinacy, all the fine intellect as well as the superstition and gloom of the early Puritans. He was the quintessence of Puritanism.
The stories of Cotton Mather's wonderful precocity sound strangely unreal in these days. He seems never to have had a childhood. Hebrew and Greek and Latin early became to him as his mother tongue. At fifteen he had received his degree at Harvard College with the highest possible bonors of the institution, and at twenty-two he was his father's assistant in the old North Church, succeeding him in due time as pastor.
The Witchcraft Delusion. — Mather's life was one of ceaseless activity. "To preach seventy sermons in public," observes one writer, "forty more in private, keep thirty vigils and sixty fasts, and still have time for persecuting witches, was nothing unusual for him
