"
Such fantastic conceits, which for a period blighted the literature of the
leading European nations, had their last great exponent in Cotton Mather.
Minor writers still indulge in these conceits, and find willing readers
among the uneducated, the tired, and those who are bored when they are
required to do more than skim the surface of things. John Seccomb, a
Harvard graduate of 1728, the year in which Mather died, then gained fame
from such lines as:--
"A furrowed brow,
Where corn might grow,"
but the best prose and poetry have for a long time won their readers for
other qualities. Even the taste of the next generation showed a change, for
Cotton Mather's son, Samuel, noted as a blemish his father's "straining for
far-fetched and dear-bought hints." Cotton Mather's most repellent habit to
modern readers is his overloading his pages with quotations in foreign
languages, especially in Latin. He thus makes a pedantic display of his
wide reading.
He is not always accurate in his presentation of historical or biographical
matter, but in spite of all that can be said against the _Magnalia_, it is
a vigorous presentation of much that we should not willingly let die.
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