We can read of
the later New Englanders in the making, among the works of Cotton Mather,
his father Increase Mather, and the witch-burning, periwig-hating,
doctrinal Judge Sewall, who so manfully confessed and atoned for his
mistake about the Salem witches. These men, or many of them, were deeply-
learned Calvinists, according to the standard of their day, a day lasting
from, say, the Restoration to 1730. Cotton Mather, in particular, is
erudite, literary--nay, full of literary vanity--mystical, visionary,
credulous to an amusing degree.
But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish correspondent and
counterpart, Wodrow. The sons or grandsons of these men gained the War
of Independence. Of this they are naturally proud, and the circumstance
is not infrequently mentioned in Dr. Holmes's works. Their democracy is
not roaring modern democracy, but that of the cultivated middle classes.
Their stern Calvinism slackened into many "isms," but left a kind of
religiosity behind it. One of Dr. Holmes's mouthpieces sums up his whole
creed in the two words _Pater Noster_. All these hereditary influences
are consciously made conspicuous in Dr. Holmes's writings, as in
Hawthorne's. In Hawthorne you see the old horror of sin, the old terror
of conscience, the old dread of witchcraft, the old concern about
conduct, converted into aesthetic sources of literary pleasure, of
literary effects.
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