ment until 1699 flood-tide in the affairs of the Mathers had passed for all time. That they did not recognize this fact makes their subsequent history only the more pitiable. X THE COLLEGE AT CAMBRIDGE To discuss in any detail the history of Harvard College would be, of course, quite outside the province of a book on Colonial Boston. But, as an institution of which Increase Mather, one of Boston's most noted divines, was for a number of years president, as an enterprise to which Cotton Mather longed throughout his later life to give himself as head, and as a school in which almost all the men who made deep marks upon Boston's early history were educated, Harvard has, undeniably, a certain claim upon our attention. This, too, quite apart from the fact that it memorializes an early Puritan minister to whom we owe it to ourselves here to pay at least a passing tribute. Only seven years after the arrival of Governor Winthrop with the first charter of the colony the General Court voted (1636) "four hundred pounds towards a school or college. Two years later, John Harvard, a young graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who had emigrated to Charlestown, died, and bequeathed one-half of his whole property and his entire library to the proposed institution. His estate amounted to £779 17s. 2d., which shows he must have been among the most wealthy of the early settlers, - and his library consisted of three hundred and twenty volumes. Of this goodly collection of books but one survives to-day, -Downame's "Christian Warfare," - all the others having been destroyed in the fire of 1764. At the time of his death Harvard was assistant minister to Rev. Z. Symmes in the first church at Charlestown. He was buried in the old Charlestown buryingground and to his memory the alumni of Harvard University there erected September 26, 1828, what was then regarded as a very impressive granite monument. The munificence of the Rev. John Harvard inspired further enthusiasm in the magistrates and made the common people, also, very anxious to give their mites towards the new institution of learning. There is, indeed, something very touching in these early gifts, which reflect the simplicity of the necessities in that period as well as the earnest desire of the |