genius, and his most delectable gift to an admiring public, was that blazing and sulphurous poem, _The Day of Doom; or, A poetical Description of the great and last Judgment_. This great poem, which, with entire unconsciousness, attributes to the Divine Being a character the most execrable and loathsome to be met with, perhaps, in any literature, Christian or pagan, had for a hundred years a popularity far exceeding that of any other work, in prose or verse, produced in America before the Revolution. The eighteen hundred copies of the first edition were sold within a single year; which implies the purchase of a copy of _The Day of Doom_ by at least every thirty-fifth person then in New England,--an example of the commercial success of a book never afterward equalled in this country. Since that time, the book has been repeatedly published; at least once in England, and at least eight times in America--the last time being in 1867. _The Dynasty of the Mathers._--At the time of his arrival in Boston--August, 1635--Richard Mather was thirty-nine years of age; a man of extensive and precise learning in the classics, in the Scriptures, and in divinity; already a famous preacher. This man, “the progenitor of all the Mathers in New England,” and the first of a line of great preachers and great men of letters that continued to hold sway there through the entire colonial era, had in himself the chief traits that distinguished his family through so long a period;--great physical endurance, a voracious appetite for the reading of books, an alarming propensity to the writing of books, a love of political leadership in church and state, the faculty of personal conspicuousness, finally, the homiletic gift. His numerous writings were, of course, according to the demand of his time and neighbourhood;--sermons, a catechism, a treatise on justification, public letters upon church government, several controversial documents, the preface to the Old Bay Psalm Book, and many of the marvels of metrical expression to be viewed in the body of that work.