VIII

ESSAYS, NEWSPAPERS, AND ALMANACS

IN the first quarter of the eighteenth century old literary patterns were melting to be cast into new moulds. Some of them were slow to sink and stubbornly kept their antique shape amidst the general fusion. Others floated in sight as dross and slag after their substance was gone.

The most notable example of persistent survival of oldtime artificiality was the ceaseless production of the Mathers, ending, apparently, only with their lives. Increase Mather had just turned out his "Elijah's Mantle" and Cotton his "Impressions Produced by Earthquakes" when they both were translated to another world, having discoursed on most terrestrial and many celestial subjects here. In verse Nicholas Noyes had attained the heights of the fantastic in appropriate elegies on contemporary worthies like John Higginson, who, he sang:

"For rich array cared not a fig,

And wore Elisha's periwig,

Before he went among the dead

He children's children's children had."

Or like Joseph Green:

"In God's house we late did see

A Green and growing olive tree.
His Master's work he did so ply,
He did but just get time to die."

These masters of quibbling contortion had admirers and imitators, who may all be dismissed with other antique

spinning wheels of verse and prose to the storeroom of colonial curiosities.

Dummer.

A new style came in with Jeremiah Dummer. The elders had great hopes of him in the pulpit, but he was too fine-spun to follow their traditions. The ideals of the seventeenth century were getting stale and its idols shopworn. The spirit of a new era was in the air outside the unventilated meeting-house, and the promising graduate of Harvard in the class of '99, two centuries ago, got a sniff of it. He did his best to satisfy a Boston congregation, but an essay is not a sermon. Yet the essay had arrived and was henceforward to share attention with the sermon. The first number of the "Spectator" was about to be printed, and the youthful prodigy who had disappointed critical listeners found himself in London in time to read Addison's account of his own life in the issue of March 1, 1710. Henceforth, as agent of Massachusetts, his associations were with its politics rather than its theology, and in his "Letter to a Noble Lord," concerning the late expedition to Canada, he makes the transition from divinity to a statesmanship which was soon to become conspicuous in America. To this he afterward contributed his "Defense of New England Charters," a forerunner of the state papers which preceded the Declaration of Independence. It was reprinted thirty-eight years later as applicable to colonial issues in the days of the pre-revolution controversy with Great Britain. All that need be said of it here is that its style shows the author's acquaintance with contemporary writings in England, and that he was willing to be taught by them. His predecessors had not been. In separatist isolation they were a law and a pattern unto themselves

and each other through all the preceding century. With one or two exceptions they turned their backs upon polite literature and set their faces as a flint against Tudor and Stuart belles-lettres. Mosaic in their law, they became Hebraic in their literature. When they laid the foundations of empire in the stern righteousness of the Pentateuch they did well; but to build a literature upon the archaic style of the law and the prophets was to go back twenty-five centuries. It is by no means necessary to confound these two achievements or to say that they won equal distinction in theocratic politics and in letters, or that their books will live except as curiosities, and as they may belong to the building of a nation. No doubt this last was a higher occupation than creating an immortal literature, but the one process is not the other, nor often coincident with the other. Good literature may follow good government afar. It began to appear early in the eighteenth century, and this Jeremiah Dummer was the prophet of its coming, if not its pioneer. His associations in London may not have been fortunate, but he must have been as open to literary influences from the works of Dryden and Swift, Addison and Steele, as to social and political sway by Lord Bolingbroke and the Tories.

In any case what he wrote is a pleasant contrast to contemporary writings here, of which Cotton Mather's "Essays to Do Good" is likely to survive the longest, since Benjamin Franklin acknowledged his indebtedness to it. So Benjamin Wadsworth's "Dissuasion from Tavern Hunting and Excessive Drinking," written for the benefit of Harvard students, may still have its value for their successors and for other students by reason of its precepts rather than for its literary worth.

A mighty man in his day was John Wise, the Ipswich parson who scented prelacy in the slightest suggestion of Presbyterianism, and smashed a conspiracy against church independency with a single blow of his Thor hammer under the mild title of "The Churches' Quarrel Exposed." It is a fine example of surviving Puritan polemics, containing strong arguments enforced by strong words.

Cotton Mather and others had made a series of "proposals" which squinted away from the independency of each congregation in ordering its own affairs and pronouncing upon its own minister, who in theory at least was to be chosen from its own ranks. To one of these proposals, that an association of ministers should be the judge of a candidate's fitness, after hearing him preach, this defender of the primitive faith replies as follows, after a preliminary compliment to academical learning:

"What can a sermon do at deciding this question? for that the most sensible and valuable, who are usually the most humble and tender are liable by this stupendous examination, to be baffled by their own temerity, and quite dashed out of countenance by their own fear. Alas! upon their first entrance upon the stage, to appear in so august and awful a presence, as having in their minds the resemblance of their going into the Spanish Inquisition, rather than dwelling amongst the softer measures of the gospel. Luther himself hardly ever got over something of a panic fear attending him through the course of his ministry; and, indeed, men of the quickest senses are most liable to these paroxysms. Then surely to put our tyros to this test, which may daunt and dispirit the greatest hero, is noways proportionable.... Indeed the bold and brazen man who can make a greater figure with half the stock by many shirking tricks and dissembling artifices, defended and supported with

confidence and delivery, may obtain the euge juvenis that they noways deserve. To conclude, as the proverb is, 'one swallow makes not the spring.' So in this trial, one good or mean sermon cannot determine the man, or umpire his case."

Stronger language is used when the peril to the ancient order appears imminent. The associations of the clergy, he says, began in their meeting to pray for deliverance from Indian depredations and other afflictions, but these meetings came to be more and more like ecclesiastical conventions with incidental ambitions for office, and he breaks out:

"Alas! Alas! empire and supreme rule is a glorious thing! Now this conceit did begin pretty much to predominate, especially in some gentlemen that were inclined to Presbyterian principles, who improving their advantages of sense and influence to intrigue others of a lower set of intellectuals, brought the business so near to a conclusion as you find it in this proposal. When they had thus far advanced and ripened their design, out comes these proposals, like Aaron's golden calf, the fifth day of November, 1705."

He remembers that this is the anniversary of the “Gunpowder-treason day," and exclaims, "Why, gentlemen! have you forgot it? a fatal day to traitors." And the golden calf reminds him of

"that great and terrible beast with seven heads and ten horns, which was nothing else a few ages ago but just such another calf as this is . . . now grown to be such a mad, furious, and wild bull that there is scarce a potentate in the world that dare take this beast by the horns when he begins to bounce and bellow. Therefore to conclude, and infer, obsta principiis! It is wisdom to nip such growths in the bud, and keep down by early slaughter such a breed of cattle."