"Mather" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shadow to the right front of the fort, where the bushes fringed the open sand with the level regularity of a river bank, the soldiers unsaddled their camels and prepared their food. Durrance and Captain Mather walked round the fort, and as they came to the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... meditations, and the "Life of Elizabeth Seton"—evangelist, it would appear, of North America and of New England in particular. As far as my experience goes, there is a fair field for some more evangelisation in these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I should like to give him a reading of this little work in heaven, where I hope he dwells; but perhaps he knows all that already, and much more; and perhaps he and Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their voices in the everlasting psalm. Over the table, to conclude the inventory ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the status of the Loyalist may not have been always and everywhere enforced. There were Loyalists, such as the Rev. Mather Byles of Boston, who refused to be molested, and who survived the Revolution unharmed. But when all allowance is made for these exceptions, it is not difficult to understand how the great majority of avowed Tories came to take refuge within ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... Excellency in hand?" asked the Rev. Mather Byles, whose Presbyterian scruples had not kept him from the entertainment. "Trust me, sir, I have already laughed more than beseems my cloth at your Homeric confabulation with yonder ragamuffin General of ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... the Puritan divines Old Cotton Mather brightest shines, And he could be a funny man, Because he was a Puritan:— A Puritan, A funny man, Old ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... was made between the adherents of the ancient faith of Connecticut and the followers of the more recently introduced order of Episcopacy. When old Dr. Snodgrass died and was buried, the Rev. Cotton Mather Hopkins, who was an energetic widower of perhaps thirty-five years, made an eloquent address at his funeral, comparing him to the prophet Samuel, the apostle John, and a green bay tree whose foundations ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... MATHER, COTTON, an American divine, born in Boston; notorious for his belief in witchcraft, and for the persecution he provoked against those charged with it by his zeal in spreading the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... with the heavenly gift of the high aesthetic, which no birth or breeding can secure, and threw himself into that common ground where art and religion meet—the literature of Christian medieval art. Things must, however, have greatly changed among our brethren since the days of Cotton Mather, or even of Jonathan Edwards, when a person in Dr Magoon's position could embellish his private ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... paternal and maternal) were, in the palmy colonial times, as abject slaves to superstition as could well be imagined. The Waites of Salem were famous persecutors of witches, and Sinai Higginbotham (Captivity's great-great-grandfather on her mother's side of the family) was Cotton Mather's boon companion, and rode around the gallows with that zealous theologian on that memorable occasion when five young women were hanged at Danvers upon the charge of having tormented little children with their damnable arts of witchcraft. Human thought is like a monstrous ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... early Quakers, Cotton Mather, after attributing the origin of this sect "to some fanatics here in our town of Salem," describes the principles of "the old Foxian Quakerism" as follows: "There is in every man a certain excusing and condemning principle, which indeed is nothing but some ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... and is determined to keep it. Merchants and brokers talk Kidd on 'Change. Groups at the hotels discuss the nautical hero. Badly-executed pictures of him stare at you from the shop-windows. Cotton Mather, the great gun of the clergy here, blazes away at this "child of iniquity" from the pulpit; and it is understood that a prominent publishing-house has already arranged to bring out The Autobiography of a Buccaneer. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... our New-England clergy was this Dr. Burge. He held the old creed-formulas through which Wilson and Mather declared their faith, yet warmed them into ruddy life by whatever fire the last transcendental Prometheus or Comte-devoted scientist filched from aerial or material heaven. A good diner-out, a good visitor among the poor. His parishioners ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... amorous cat. What happened to the good folk of that picturesque little fishing-hamlet is worth retelling in brief. In order properly to retell it, a contemporary witness shall be called upon to testify in the case of the Stone-Throwing Devils of Newcastle. It is the Rev. Cotton Mather who addresses you—"On June 11, 1682, showers of stones were thrown by an invisible hand upon the house of George Walton at Portsmouth [Newcastle was then a part of the town]. Whereupon the people going out found ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... in their effort to know the truth? Why was Paul, the conscientious, intellectual giant, so deceived that he "verily thought he was doing God service" while destroying the best and holiest thing that had ever come to earth? Why did Cotton Mather and other saintly, scholarly Christians martyr innocent saints as witches? Why did devout patriots of the North and South slaughter each other in cold blood? Why were the scientific theses written at Harvard during forty years, ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... settlement of Westchester was commenced in the year 1654, also by some Puritans from Connecticut, who adopted its present name, and the Rev. Ezekiel Fogge was their first 'independent minister;' and in 1684 a Mr. Warham Mather was called 'for one whole year, and that he shall have sixty pounds, in country produce, at money price, for his salary, and that he shall be paid every quarter.' Governor Fletcher, however, declined inducting the Presbyterian into that living, 'as it was altogether impossible,' he said, 'it ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... instincts who, being freed from their persecutors, became in turn the most violent persecutors of those that did not profess their particular creed. It was particularly due to the preaching of Cotton Mather that a panic of fear was created through the New England Colonies. Mrs. Ann Hibbons was tried before the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, sentenced and hanged on the 19th of June, 1656. "Goody Oliver" was executed as a witch ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... countries believed fully in witchcraft. Sir Matthew Hale had given a legal opinion on the subject; Lord Bacon believed in witchcraft; and there are strong reasons for thinking that Shakspeare and other great men of the time of Queen Elizabeth and still later believed in it fully. Cotton Mather, Judge Sewall, Peter Sargent, Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton, all belonging to Boston, were the leaders in the proceedings against ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... The Mather family and Gov. Hutchinson are alone to be compared with Mr. Prince as collectors of books, and theirs avail little, as they have been scattered and destroyed. It is a matter of congratulation that the greater portion of Mr. Prince's ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... ecclesiastical codes dealing, exactly in the same spirit and in the same way, with crime and with vice, recognizing nothing but a certain difference in degree between murder and masturbation. In the ninth century, and even much later, in Calvin's Geneva and Cotton Mather's New England, it was possible to carry into practice this theocratic conception of the unity of vices and crimes and the punishment as sins of both alike, for the community generally accepted that point of view. But that is very far from being the case in the United States of to-day. The ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... so decisively given a QUIETUS to the question as to the birthplace of Cotton Mather, that there is no danger of its ever being revived again. But there is another question of equal importance to many, to the literary world in particular, which should in like manner be put to rest. WHO WAS MOTHER GOOSE? and WHEN were her melodies first given to the world? These are questions ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... little matter of stocks to talk over with you" ("matter" almost sounded like "mather"), "and I thought you'd better come here rather than that I should come down to your office. We can be more private-like, and, besides, I'm not as young as I used ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... in Chaucer (3 vols.); Root's The Poetry of Chaucer; Lowell's Essay, in My Study Windows; Hammond's Chaucer: a Biographical Manual; Hempl's Chaucer's Pronunciation; Introductions to school editions of Chaucer, by Skeat, Liddell, and Mather. (3) Texts and selections: The Oxford Chaucer, 6 vols., edited by Skeat, is the standard; Skeat's Student's Chaucer; The Globe Chaucer (Macmillan); Works of Chaucer, edited by Lounsbury (Crowell); Pollard's The Canterbury Tales, Eversley edition; Skeat's Selections from Chaucer (Clarendon Press); ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Dr. Franklin as saying in 1789, "When I left New England in the year 1723, this word had never been used among us, as far as I know, but in the sense of ameliorated or made better, except once in a very old book of Dr. Mather's, entitled Remarkable Providences." Dr. Increase Mather's Providences was published in 1684. In 1679 a synod assembled at Boston, and the result of its labors was published in the same year by John Foster, under the title, Necessity of a Reformation. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... of Royal Arch Masons took place at Stonington, on the anniversary of the attack. The revenue cutters Eagle, from New Haven, the Newport cutter, and the steamboat Long-branch (Capt. Mather), from New London, brought numerous masonic and other guests,—military companies,—and a band of music. A procession of some three hundred brethren and companions was formed, by order of Doct. Thomas Hubbard, M. E. G. H. P., under the direction of ...
— The Defence of Stonington (Connecticut) Against a British Squadron, August 9th to 12th, 1814 • J. Hammond Trumbull
... have been melasses, as Webster and his provincials spell it,—or Molossa's, as dear old smattering, chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the "Magnalia"? Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries, who make barn-door-fowl flights of learning in "Notes and Queries"!—ye Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... converted reprobate, who rode one hundred thousand miles on one horse in the cause of Methodism, and who was considered by John Wesley as a strong enough man to be pitted against the ablest champions of Calvinism; John Pawson, Alexander Mather and other worthy men—of humble birth, it may be, and scanty acquirements, but earnest, devoted Christians—would all deserve to be noticed in a professed history of Methodism. In a brief sketch, like the present, all that can be said ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... F. G. Mather obtained substantially the same particulars of Joe's digging in connection with Harper from the widow of Joseph McKune about the year 1879, and he said that the owner of the farm at that time "for a number of years had been engaged in filling the holes with stone to protect ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Christ Church," said Berinthia, pointing to the nearest steeple. "That beyond is the Old North Meetinghouse where Cotton Mather preached.[18] Of course ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Sometimes you would see him behind his counter selling broadcloth, sometimes measuring linen; next day he would be dealing in mercery-ware. High heads, ribbons, gloves, fans, and lace he understood to a nicety. Charles Mather could not bubble a young beau better with a toy; nay, he would descend even to the selling of tape, garters, and shoe-buckles. When shop was shut up he would go about the neighbourhood and earn half-a-crown by teaching the young men and maids ...
— English Satires • Various
... Isaac)—A remarkable letter from him addressed to the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather, explanatory of Neal's History of New England, on "the persecuting principles and practices of the first planters," and urging the formal repeal of the "cruel and sanguinary statutes" which had been passed by the Massachusetts Bay Court under ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... here nor there;— I'm talking about an old arm-chair. You've heard, no doubt, of PARSON TURELL? Over at Medford he used to dwell; Married one of the Mather's folk; Got with his wife a chair of oak,— Funny old chair, with seat like wedge, Sharp behind and broad front edge,— One of the oddest of human things, Turned all over with knobs and rings,— But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand,— Fit ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of style and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be called) than in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia." For Mather, like a true provincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual in such cases, betrays all its weakness by the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... P——-'s garden fence, are the most ancient stones remaining in the graveyard; moss-grown, deeply sunken. One to "Dr. John Swinnerton, Physician," in 1688; another to his wife. There, too, is the grave of Nathaniel Mather, the younger brother of Cotton, and mentioned in the Magnalia as a hard student, and of great promise. "An aged man at nineteen years," saith the gravestone. It affected me deeply, when I had cleared away the grass from the half-buried stone, and read the name. An apple-tree or ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... people," many are distinguished in some way or other, and all are distinctly worth while. But "the banking Cabots" have been deep in finance from the very beginning, from the earliest of colonial times. The salary of the Reverend Cotton Mather was paid to him by a Cabot, and another Cabot banked whatever portion of it he saved for a rainy day. In the Revolution a certain Galusha Cabot, progenitor of the line of Galusha Cabots, assisted the struggling patriots of Beacon Hill to ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to Maduro in forty years. When Rime had sailed away to seek his fortune in Tahiti he and his people were heathens; when he returned he found them rigid Protestants of the Boston New England Cotton-Mather type, to whom the name of "Papist" was an abomination and a horror. And when Rime said that he too was a Christian—a Katoliko—they promptly told him to clear out. He was not an American Christian anyway, they said, and had no business ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... gouty; a wig for decency, not for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin—and for that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore against the traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness, and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You could not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and Webster and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... America. But the serious attitude here toward art, how impossible that word has been made, is charming. And you will be glad to know that I have had some success in the French good opinion. A marble, Cotton Mather, that I cut from the stone, has been bought ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Virginia may almost be counted upon the fingers. It is equally true that west of Ohio authors who have won a general and permanent reputation are few. If we survey American literature from the time of Cotton Mather (who may perhaps be called the first author of the country whose works are still remembered and read) to the present, we find that a majority of the best authors, both in prose and ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... note to Mather now, telling him what to do about the mortgage," he continued in his methodical, undemonstrative manner. As he sat down at the desk and drew pen and paper towards him, he paused a moment. "You will see to the nurses,—they should have two. The doctors may decide on an ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... and Browne,—though he does use that abominable word, reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the ooze of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as his we know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few can find it. It is the open secret of all true genius. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... not rely on verse like this for our understanding of their outlook on life and death. Beside Wigglesworth's lines we should place the epitaph, "Reserved for a Glorious Resurrection," composed by the great orthodox Puritan clergyman, Cotton Mather (p. 46), for his own infant, which died unbaptized when four days old. It is well to remember that both the Puritans and their clergy had a quiet way of believing that God had reserved to himself the final interpretation of his ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the community had become accustomed to them. Most of the Massachusetts colonists thought the Plymouth people unnecessarily alarmed. They listened to the story of Sassamon with great incredulity. "His information," says Dr. I. Mather, "because it had an Indian original, and one can hardly believe them when they do speak the truth, was not at ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... in Boston a distinguished family of puritanical ministers of the name of Mather. Richard Mather, an English non-conformist divine, had emigrated to America in 1636, and settled at Dorchester, where, in 1639, he had a son born, who was named, in accordance with the peculiar nomenclature of the ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... with whom she was walking was Bessie Mather, her most intimate friend just then. Bessie was the daughter of a portrait-painter, who didn't have many portraits to paint, so he was apt to be discouraged, and his family to feel rather poor. Eyebright was not old enough to perceive the inconveniences of being ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... themselves with Tory congregations, or lost their pulpits, or had them boarded up against them. The wiser part was taken by most in avoiding politics. The sole Congregational minister who supported the king was Mather Byles, famed for his witticisms, and he likewise declined to bring into the pulpit any mention of the affairs of the day. "In the first place," he told those who demanded an expression of his opinion, "I do not understand ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... "When COTTON MATHER came over in the Grate Eastern, he sent out a dove to see if the Pilgrims, would allow her to pick any flowers off ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... Increase Mather, the agent of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with the aid of friends in England, endeavored to gain the restoration of the old charter from King William, but was unsuccessful; a new one was granted (1691), ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... sweet-faced lady with a large mole on her right cheek. Margaret used to call her 'Moley,' when she was mad at her, which was right frequent. Her name was Magdalene Mather and she'd been married three times. She was dreadful careless with her husbands and had mislaid 'em all. Not bein' able to find 'em again, she just reckoned on their bein' dead and was ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... continent between dinner and tea, we say that such a phenomenon as Mahomet were impossible, and behold Joe Smith and the State of Deseret! Turning over the yellow leaves of the same copy of "Webster on Witchcraft" which Cotton Mather studied, I thought, "Well, that goblin is laid at last!"—and while I mused the tables were turning, and the chairs beating the devil's tattoo all over Christendom. I have a neighbor who dug down through tough strata of clay to a spring pointed out by a witch-hazel rod in the hands ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... England. And, like many of those other inventors, he numbered among his ancestors for generations two types of men—on the one hand, a line of skilled artisans and mechanics; on the other, the most intellectual men of their time such as clergymen and schoolmasters, one of them being Increase Mather. We see in Langley, as in some of his brother New England inventors, the later flowering of the Puritan ideal stripped of its husk of superstition and harshness—a high sense of duty and of integrity, an intense conviction that the reason for a man's ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... gave a history of the Reformation; and, when Flemming thought he was near the end, he heard him say, that he should divide his discourse into four heads. This reminded him of the sturdy old Puritan, Cotton Mather, who after preaching an hour, would coolly turn the hour-glass on the pulpit, and say; "Now, my beloved hearers, let us take another glass." He stole out into the silent, deserted street, and went to visit the veteran sculptor Dannecker. He found him ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... East, where I found paying audiences in the fall or autumn of the year. These lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; and, as the result of the Browning lecture given in the Unitarian Schoolroom in Wakefield street, Adelaide, I received from the pen of Mr. J. B. Mather a clever epigram. The room was large and sparsely filled, and to the modest back seat taken by my friend my voice scarcely penetrated. So he amused himself ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Walter Ludlow, with animation. "He not only excels in his peculiar art, but possesses vast acquirements in all other learning and science. He talks Hebrew with Dr. Mather, and gives lectures in anatomy to Dr. Boylston. In a word, he will meet the best instructed man among us, on his own ground. Moreover, he is a polished gentleman,—a citizen of the world,—yes, a true cosmopolite; for he will speak like a native ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... believe, when you know she paints Fans for all her Female Acquaintance, and draws all her Relations Pictures in Miniature; the first must be mounted by no body but Colmar, and the other set by no body but Charles Mather. What follows, is still much worse than the former; for, as I told you, she is a great Artist at her Needle, tis incredible what Sums she expends in Embroidery; For besides what is appropriated to her personal Use, as Mantuas, Petticoats, Stomachers, Handkerchiefs, Purses, Pin-cushions, and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the first press was established in Boston by permission of the General Court; and two additional licensers were appointed—one of whom was the Rev. Increase Mather. The printer was John Foster, who was also somewhat of an astronomer. He made and printed almanacs; but died at the early age of thirty-three. He was a man of so much consideration that two poems were published on the occasion of his death. One ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "Upper Branch of the Government" were the moderate or loyalist party; the majority of the "House of Deputies," whose "elections were controlled by the ministers," were the independence party; violent language by Dr. Increase Mather, whose appeal from man to God was decided against him (in a ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... see me, and lay all night with me, and allso Mr. Thomas Jones, and in the Monday morning went by water to London, and so the same day homeward. A meridie circa 3 recepi a Regina Domina 50. Dec. 8th, at Chelsey disputing with Doctor Mather, bishop of Bristow; in danger of water hora 5 I stayed at Chelsey. Dec. 14th, the Quene's Majestie called for me at my dore as she rod by to take ayre, and I met her at Estshene gate. Dec. 16th, Mr. Candish receyved ...
— The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee - And the Catalog of His Library of Manuscripts • John Dee
... Ward, Foote, Cornelius, Shepards, Bristed, Wickerham, Doubleday, Van Volkenberg, Robbins, Tyler, Miller, Lyman, Pierpont, and Churchill, the author of "Richard Carvel," is a recent graduate. In Amherst at one time there were of this family President Gates and Professors Mather, Tyler, and Todd. Wherever found they are leaders even in college faculties. Those who know what Gates, Mather, Tyler, and Todd have stood for as president and professors of Amherst will appreciate what Jonathan Edwards' blood ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship
... believe his eyes. What sort of an epidemic was this anyhow? He went inside and immediately a victrola started up a two-step and lo and behold, there before him whirling ecstatically about the floor, held in feminine embraces, were Happy Mather and Joe Crocker, the irreconcilables ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... man who, if he should err deeply, is yet so great that, like Cotton Mather, he might not hesitate to stand uncovered on the street-corners and ask the forgiveness of mankind. Such men are saved by their enemies. Their own good and the good of humanity require that their balance of power shall not be too great. Had the North gone down, Gladstone might ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... as American literature is concerned, Franklin has no contemporaries. Before the Autobiography only one literary work of importance had been produced in this country—Cotton Mather's Magnalia, a church history of New England in a ponderous, stiff style. Franklin was the first American author to gain a wide and permanent reputation in Europe. The Autobiography, Poor Richard, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... the unseen world," which afforded full confirmation of the belief in demons and possession current among his contemporaries. If the story is true, the mediaeval theory of the invisible world may be, and probably is, quite correct; and the witch-finders, from Sprenger to Hopkins and Mather, are ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... is that Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, was a shrew, and had she lived in New England in Cotton Mather's time would have been a candidate for the ducking-stool. Socrates said he married her for discipline. A man in East Aurora, however, has recently made it plain to himself that Xantippe was possessed of a great and acute intellect. She knew herself, and she knew her liege as he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... room commands a exileratin view of Copps' Hill, where Cotton Mather, the father of the Reformers and sich, lies berrid. There is men even now who worship Cotton, and there is wimin who wear him next their harts. But I do not weep for him. He's bin ded too lengthy. I ain't going to be absurd, like old Mr. Skillins, in our naberhood, who is ninety-six ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... ostrich eggshells, and "a few ragged skins bundled on her head or shoulder," while the man carries only his spear, bow, and quiver.[170] The conditions among the American Indians were practically the same. Cotton Mather said of the Indians of Massachusetts: "The men are most abominably slothful, making their poor squaws or wives to plant, and dress, and barn, and beat their corn, and build their wigwams for them;"[171] and Jones, referring to the ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... young ladies, of course, was regulated on the strictest principles. Early rising, prayers, breakfast, studies; the daily walk, rain or shine, under the watchful convoy of Miss Hood, the girls in columns of twos; tennis on the school court, or skating on the school pond. Cotton Mather himself could not have disapproved of the Sundays, nor of the discourse of the elderly Doctor Moale (which you heard if you were not a Presbyterian), although the reverend gentleman was distinctly Anglican in appearance and manners. Sometimes Honora felt devout, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that unless he were found "conformable to the government" he was not to be suffered to remain within the limits of its jurisdiction. An incident of this departure rests on the sole authority of Cotton Mather, and is best told in his ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin;" and with her came Margaret Boufflet and a host of others; and finally, in England, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose famous book, formidable in its day, would seem rather conservative now; and in America, that pious and worthy dame, Mrs. H. Mather Crocker, Cotton Mather's grandchild, who, in 1848, published the first book on the "Rights of Woman" ever written on this side ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Mather could not avoid a tone of pious boastfulness when he narrated the doings of New England. Everything was remarkable. New England had the most remarkable providences, the most remarkable painful preachers, the most remarkable ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... The incidents narrated in this chapter were gathered from Cotton Mather's "Invisible World," and legends current at the time. Strange as it may seem, these narratives were believed, and some are ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... Protestantism manifested the same influence. Of course, the settlers took the superstition of witchcraft with them, but it underwent no diminution in a new land. Increase Mather and his celebrated son, Cotton Mather, were the principal agents in stirring up the belief to frenzy point, and a commission was appointed to rout out witches and suppress their practices. There was soon a plentiful supply of victims. One woman ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... clamour, and I found that "The Battle of the Books" had begun raging anew. Two figures entered in lively dispute. One was dressed in plain homespun and the other wore a scholar's gown over a suit of motley. I gathered from their conversation that they were Cotton Mather and William Shakspere. Mather insisted that the witches in "Macbeth" should be caught and hanged. Shakspere replied that the witches had already suffered enough at the hands of commentators. They were pushed aside by the twelve knights of the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... wearing a| |pair of silver spectacles and accompanied by a | |petite, brown-eyed girl twenty years his junior, | |comes to your house for work, telephone the Boston | |police. They are the two, it is alleged, who robbed | |the Mather ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... New England. There seemed a strange coincidence and sympathy between vital Christianity in its most honourable sense, and the fear of the devil, who appeared to be "come down unto them, with great wrath." Mr. Increase Mather, and Mr. Cotton Mather, his son, two clergymen of highest reputation in the neighbourhood, by the solemnity and awe with which they treated the subject, and the earnestness and zeal which they displayed, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Continuation of Milner; Life of Knox; Gilpin's Lives of the Reformers; Fuller's and Warner's Ecclesiastical History of England; Millar's Propagation of Christianity; Gillies' Historical Collections; Jones' Church History; Mather's Magnalia; Neale's History of the Puritans; Wisner's History of the Old South Church, Boston; Bogue and Bennett's History of the Dissenters; Benedict's History of the Baptists; Life of Wesley; History of Methodism; Life of Whitefield; Millar's Life of Dr. Rodgers; Crantz's Ancient and Modern ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... their medicine-men cured by incantations in the belief that devils were thus driven out of their patients, and in the early history of the country the red man was credited by white settlers with powers hardly inferior to those of the oriental and European magicians of the middle ages. Cotton Mather detected a relation between Satan and the Indians, and he declares that certain of the Algonquins were trained from boyhood as powahs, powwows, or wizards, acquiring powers of second sight and communion with gods and spirits through abstinence from food and sleep and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... own courage. There were spirits in Massachusetts congenial with the spirits of the distinguished friends of the Revolution in England. There were those who were fit to associate with the boldest asserters of civil liberty; and Mather himself, then in England, was not unworthy to be ranked with those sons of the Church, whose firmness and spirit in resisting kingly encroachments in matters of religion, entitled them to the gratitude of their own and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... figure being Sir Edmund Andros, elderly, but erect and soldier-like. Those around him were his favourite councillors, and the bitterest foes of New England. At his right hand rode Edward Randolph, our arch-enemy, that "blasted wretch," as Cotton Mather calls him, who achieved the downfall of our ancient government, and was followed with a sensible curse through life and to his grave. On the other side was Bullivant, scattering jests and mockery as he rode along. Dudley came behind, with a downcast look, dreading, as well ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... were substantial and hard-headed laymen like Winthrop and Dudley, and able and conscientious clergymen such as Cotton, Norton and Wilson, Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and Richard Mather. During the eclipse of Parliament and the Country party in England, the former found many avenues of advancement closed, while their estates, even when carefully husbanded, would no longer permit them, as Winthrop said, to "keep sail ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... over another New England document in which the same "bloody tenet" of persecution had been defended-to wit a certain "Model of Church and Civil Power" drawn up by some New England ministers in concert, and in which Mr. Cotton had had a hand, though Mr. Richard Mather appears to have been the chief author. [Footnote: Some particulars in this description of the treatise are from Mr. Underhill's Introduction to the Hanserd Knolly's Society's Reprint of it, but the description in the main is from ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... opened, many signs of change were in the air. The third generation of native-born Americans was becoming secularized. The theocracy of New England had failed. In the height of the tragic folly over the supposed "witchcraft" in Salem, Increase Mather and his son Cotton had held up the hands of the judges in their implacable work. But before five years had passed, Judge Sewall does public penance in church for his share of the awful blunder, desiring "to take the shame and blame of it." Robert Calef's cool pamphlet ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Ludlow, with animation. "He not only excels in his peculiar art, but possesses vast acquirements in all other learning and science. He talks Hebrew with Dr. Mather and gives lectures in anatomy to Dr. Boylston. In a word, he will meet the best-instructed man among us on his own ground. Moreover, he is a polished gentleman, a citizen of the world—yes, a true ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... exactly call it, for I don't see the good of schools and teaching A B C, any more than I did before, only Mr. Gray does, so I'm to shut my eyes, and leap over the ditch to the side of education. I've told Sally already, that if she does not mind her work, but stands gossiping with Nelly Mather, I'll teach her her lessons; and I've never caught ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... I could walk with you part of this term," went on Rose, putting her arm round Clover's waist. "But you see, unluckily, I'm engaged straight through. All of us old girls are. I walk with May Mather this week and next, then Esther Dearborn for a month, then Lilly Page for two weeks, and all the rest of the time with Mary. I can't think why I promised Lilly. I'm sure I don't want to go with her. I'd ask Mary to let me off, only I'm afraid she'd ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... Noyes has annually given the first prize of $75 and Harlow N. Higginbotham the second prize of $50. In Michigan R. E. Olds gave the first prize until 1913, and J. H. Moores the second prize until 1914. In Ohio Samuel Mather and J. G. Schmidlapp furnish the prizes for 1914. In New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland the prizes are given by individuals at the instigation of peace societies. In some states the second prize is given by some individual or through a collection ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... tea for two. If ye'd told me it was a party, I'd have been afther stealing the captain's Cork butter. A cook cannot do his best whin the shore-steward sends him engine-grease. Annyhow, whin ye're young an' romantic, what's it mather what ye ate?" ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... literature. It is the one big book by a big temperament that may be opposed page by page to Fromentin's critical masterpiece. Shall we further adduce the names of Morelli, Sturge Moore, Roger Fry, Perkins, Cortissoz, Lionel Cust, Colvin, Ricci, Van Dyke, Mather, Berenson, Brownell, and George Moore—who said of Ruskin that his uncritical blindness regarding Whistler will constitute his passport to fame, "the lot of critics is to be remembered by what they have failed to understand." ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... at heart!" cried Mulloy. "Ye can't git away from it, me bhoy, no mather how much ye prate about socialism and th' ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... little scene repeating itself many a time, long after Captain Thomas Green, his mate, John Madder or Mather, and another of his crew were taken to the sands at Leith on the second Wednesday in April 1705, being April 11, and there hanged within the floodmark upon a gibbet till they were dead. Mr. Forbes of Culloden, ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the pastor, and women were permitted to take part in voting on all church questions. These and other innovations occasioned much discussion; and a controversy ensued between the pastor Benjamin Colman and Increase Mather.[14] The Salem pastors, Rev. John Higginson and Rev. Nicholas Noyes, addressed a letter to the Brattle Street congregation, in which they criticised the church because it did not consult with other churches in its formation, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... given to the Puritans by no earthly potentate, their title came direct from heaven. Increase Mather said: "The Lord God has given us for a rightful possession the land of the Heathen People amongst whom we dwell;" and where are the Heathen ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... have yet seen, is that made by Morgan Brothers, 21 Bow Lane, London. It is called "The Anglo-French Feeding Bottle" S Maw, of 11 Aldersgate Street, London, has also brought out an excellent one—"The Fountain Infant's Feeding Bottle" Another good one is "Mather's Infant's Feeding Bottle" Either of these three will answer the purpose admirably. I cannot speak in terms too highly of these ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... of this earliest colony of Protestantism in America, consult Bayle's Dictionnaire, Art. Villegagnon and Ricker; Cotton Mather, Magnalia, Book I., Southey's History of Brazil; ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... deposited it eventually in the library of the Old South Church. Here it remained for half a century, still in manuscript form and frequently referred to by scholars. Thomas Hutchinson used it in compiling his "History of Massachusetts Bay," and Mather used it also. At the time of the Revolution the Old South was looted, and this document (along with many others) disappeared absolutely. No trace whatever could be found of it: the most exhaustive search was in vain, and scholars and historians ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... suffered at all severely from the inoculated smallpox. Towards the close of the same year two children of the Princess of Wales were successfully inoculated; and in 1746 an Inoculation Hospital was actually opened in London, but not without much opposition. As early as 1721 the Rev. Cotton Mather, of Boston (U. S. A.), introduced inoculation to the notice of the American physicians, and in 1722 Dr. Boylston, of Brooklyn, inoculated 247 persons, of whom about 2 per cent. died of the acquired smallpox as compared with 14 per cent. of deaths amongst 6,000 uninoculated ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... generally known that Comenius was once solicited to become President of Harvard College. The following is a quotation from Vol. II, p. 14, of Cotton Mather's MAGNALIA: ...
— The Orbis Pictus • John Amos Comenius
... that the Indians were an offshoot of the Jews, because it "proves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by interpretation, the bosom of consolation." Later, they named it Salem, "for the peace," as Cotton Mather says, "which they had and hoped in it"; and when Hugh Peters on one occasion preached at Great Pond, now Wenham, he took as his text, "At Enon, near to Salim, because there was much water there." This playing ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... their own, requiring them three days of the week to work for him by turns, and four days for themselves, and promises as soon as they can repay him the money laid out for them, he will set them at liberty."—Letter to Cromwell, by Mather Cotton: Carlyle's Letters and ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... were that little handful of God's own wheat which had been flailed by adversity, tossed and winnowed till every husk of earthly selfishness and self-will had been beaten away from them and left only pure seed, fit for the planting of a new world. It was old Master Cotton Mather who said of them, "The Lord sifted three countries to find seed ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... indolence of disposition which detained his vanishing illusions, and indulged in such studies as served to prolong the barren contemplation which had wasted his youth. My knowledge of the secret committed for eighty years to the Mather Safe made me the only person to whom Clifton could freely write. At some private inconvenience, I admitted a tolerably full intercourse with my new correspondent. He declared that the sympathy of a man in active affairs was invaluable to a solitary student like himself: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... a claim to make for them, but it may be added that they were often the wits and humorists of their localities. Mather Byles's facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences. But these were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles. True humor is an outgrowth of character. It is never found in greater perfection than in old clergymen and old college professors. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... appreciate and write poetry and contributed something to mathematics, science, and philosophy. Furthermore, having disproved the theories of their mental inferiority, some of the race, in conformity with the suggestion of Cotton Mather, were employed to ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather, President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of fools and ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... the question respecting the colonial charter was rapidly approaching an issue, and the public mind was in feverish agitation, the ministers sent out a paper of proposals for collecting facts concerning witchcraft [1681]. This brought out a work from President Mather entitled "Illustrious Providences," in which that influential person related numerous stories of the performances of persons leagued with the ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... pabulum which nourished their English corporate life. Their Calvinism was a reinterpretation of its prophetic nationalism expressed in the doctrine of the "chosen people"; their political institutions were a modification of the ideal political order it was supposed to reveal. As Cotton Mather narrates, his grandfather, John Cotton, found, on his arrival in New England, that the population was much exercised over the framing of a "civil constitution." They turned to him for help, begging "that ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... King's pleasure was declared that no printing should be allowed in the Colony. There were not wanting instances of the public burning of books as offenders against good order. Such was the fate of Elliot's book in defense of unmixed principles of popular freedom, and Calef's book against Cotton Mather, which was given to the flames at Cambridge." Cooley, Constitutional Limitations, ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... device for threading the needle while the machine is in full operation; an appliance for sewing leather—contrived by a woman in New York who runs a saddlery business there—; and many others. To the sensational inventions, originated in female brains, belong—the sea-telescope devised by Mrs. Mather, an instrument for the purpose of examining the keel of a ship without requiring her being put into the dry-dock—and a complicated machine for manufacturing paper bags, a very intricate affair which many ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... child but two, and was born in Boston, New England. My mother, the second wife, was Abiah Folger, daughter of Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of New England, of whom honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather in his church history of that country, entitled Magnalia Christi Americana, as "a godly, learned Englishman," if I remember the words rightly. I have heard that he wrote sundry small occasional pieces, but only one of them was printed, which I saw now many years ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... settlement of Plymouth. It was quoted by early chroniclers. There are extracts from it in the records at Plymouth. Thomas Prince used it when he compiled his annals. Hubbard depended on it when he wrote his "History of New England." Cotton Mather had read it, or a copy of a portion of it, when he wrote his "Magnalia." Governor Hutchinson had it when he published the second volume of his history in 1767. From that time it disappeared from the knowledge of everybody on this side of the water. All ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... status of the slave as the normal status of the Negro. The probable reason is that racial characteristics of the Indian made him a bad subject for slavery. The Massachusetts colonists found the Pequot Indians surly, revengeful and in the words of Cotton Mather unable to "endure the Yoke."[137] The Negro, on the contrary, proved himself much more tractable and therefore more profitable as a slave. These plastic race traits, in fact, have enabled the Negro to survive while the less adaptive Indian has disappeared. Thus the bonds of a servile status hardened ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Patience," said the teacher, who was distressed herself. She feared lest Squire Bean might think that it was her fault, and that she was not a competent teacher, because Patience Mather did ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins |
