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[17] “Christianus per Ignem; or, a Disciple Warming of Himself and Owning his Lord” “Nails Fastened; or, Proposals of Piety Complied Withal;” and so on. No theme appeared to be simple enough for Cotton Mather to treat simply; and in consequence most of his work is now dead. Even that greatest book of his, the formidable “Magnalia Christi Americana,” 1 can now be read only by the special student of history. “He was,” says Professor Tyler, “the last, the most vigorous, and therefore the most disagreeable representative of the fantastic school in literature; he prolonged in New England the methods of that school even after his most cultivated contemporaries there had outgrown them, and had come to dislike them. The expulsion of the beautiful from thought, from sentiment, from language; a lawless and a merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent; strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase;these are the traits of Cotton Mather's writing, ”
1 Its sub-title was The Ecclesiastical history of New England from its first planting, in the year 1620, unto the year of our Lord 1698. It was first published in London in 1702.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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