It is the standard resort of ignorant writers upon Puritanism, and especially upon Puritanic severity, to give the name of Cotton Mather as a prime expositor of cruel discipline. I have before me a magazine illustration which represents him, lean, lank, violent, and mean of aspect, with clipped head, raising a heavy bunch of rods over a cowering child. He was in reality exceedingly handsome, very richly bewigged, with the full, distinctly sensual countenance of the Cottons, not the severe ascetic features of the Mathers, and he as strongly opposed punishment by the rod as most of his friends and neighbors favored and practised it. His son wrote of him:-- "The slavish way of education carried on with raving and kicking and scourging, in schools as well as in families, he looked upon as a dreadful judgment of God on the world: he thought the practice abominable and expressed a mortal aversion to it. "The first chastisement which he would inflict for any ordinary fault, was to let the child see and hear him in an astonishment, and hardly able to believe that the child would do so base a thing. He would never come to give the child a blow, except in case of obstinacy, or something very criminal. To be chased for a while out of his presence he would make to be looked upon as the sorest punishment in his family." There can be found episodes of colonial history where the disprejudiced modern mind can perceive ample need of the sharp whippings so freely bestowed upon dull or idle scholars and slow servants. Cotton Mather was too gentle and too forbearing toward certain children with whom he had close relations. A "warm birch" applied in the early stages of that terrible tragedy, the Salem Witchcraft, to Ann Putnam, the protagonist of that drama, would doubtless so quickly have ended it in its incipiency as to obliterate it entirely from the pages of history. [Illustration: William Verstile 1769] CHAPTER XI MANNERS AND COURTESY _A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table, At least as far as he is able._ --_A Child's Garden of Verse. Robert Louis Stevenson, 1895 In ancient days in England, manners and courtesy, manly exercises, music and singing, knowledge of precedency and rank, heraldry and ability to carve, were much more important elements in education than Latin and philosophy. Children were sent to school, and placed in great men's houses to learn courtesy and the formalities of high life. Of all the accomplishments and studies of the Squire as recounted by Chaucer in the _Canterbury Tales_, but one would now be taught in English college--music. Of all which were taught, courtesy was deemed the most important. "Aristotle the Philosopher this worthye sayinge writ That manners in a chylde are more requisit