rate the court so unceremoniously instituted by him was summarily dismissed and a general pardon issued to all those who had been convicted or accused. And though a few infatuated individuals continued to urge prosecutions juries refused to bring in the verdict of guilty, and Judge Samuel Sewall stood up manfully (in 1696) at the old South Church while his confession of having done wrong in admitting" spectral evidence" at the witchcraft trials was read aloud by one of the clergymen. Stoughton, when he heard of this, declared that he had no such confession to make having acted according to the best light God had given him. Nor did Cotton Mather feel at this time any consciousness of wrong-doing. Seventeen years later, however, when his public influence was on the wane and the power of the Church, for which he had had such hopes, was also notably diminished he wrote in his Diary: "I entreated the Lord that I might understand the meaning of the Descent from the Invisible World which, nineteen years ago, produced a sermon from me, a good part of which is now published.' The sermon in question was the one which had done so much to incite the witch trials. Evidently Cotton Mather had at last come to doubt its inspiration.

Witchcraft, however, was by no means the worst of poor Sir William Phips's troubles. He had to carry on French and Indian wars not all of which turned out well, the new charter was not nearly so much liked as the Mathers had hoped it might be, and, what was of more importance than anything else, — the governor had a hasty temper and was inclined to resort to the strength of his fists when matters proved especially trying to him. Early in his administration, he had an altercation with the collector of the port of Boston which culminated in a hand-to-hand fight. And, in January, 1693, a little difficulty between him and the captain of the Nonesuch frigate brought upon the officer a caning in the streets of Boston and upon Sir William Phips a summons to return to England to explain his undignified conduct. He obeyed the summons, passed through his trial without any very great difficulty and was permitted to turn his energy into lines for which he was better fitted than for government. Then he suddenly died at the early age of forty-five.

With him died all hope of ever restoring the power of the theocracy. For though Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton, one of the old Puritan stock, remained at the head of the govern

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