Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief-Justice of Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, who is intimately known through his Diary, kept from 1673 to 1729. This has been compared with the more famous diary of Samuel Pepys, which it resembles in its confidential character and the completeness of its self-revelation, but to which it is as much inferior in historic interest as "the petty province here" was inferior in political and social importance to "Britain far away." For the most part it is a chronicle of small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae of his domestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such haps as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret." But it also affords instructive glimpses of public events, such as King Philip's War, the Quaker troubles, the English Revolution of 1688, etc. It bears about the same relation to New England history at the close of the seventeenth century as Bradford's and Winthrop's Journals bear to that of the first generation. Sewall was one of the justices who presided at the trial of the Salem witches; but for the part which he took in that wretched affair he made such atonement as was possible, by open confession of his mistake and his remorse in the presence of the Church. Sewall was one of the first writers against African slavery, in his brief tract, _The Selling of Joseph_, printed at Boston in 1700. His _Phenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, a mystical interpretation of prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identifies with America, is remembered only because Whittier, in his _Prophecy of Samuel Sewall_, has paraphrased one poetic passage which shows a loving observation of nature very rare in our colonial writers. Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the narrower sense--that is, of the imaginative representation of life--there was little or none in the colonial period. There were no novels, no plays, no satires, and--until the example of the _Spectator_ had begun to work on this side the water--no experiments even at the lighter forms of essay-writing, character-sketches, and literary criticism. There was verse of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early divines of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing, of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets," whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New-English muse, the _Emblems_ of Quarles and the _Divine Week_ of Du Bartas, as translated by Sylvester. The _Magnalia_ contains a number of these things in Latin and English, and is itself well bolstered with complimentary introductions in meter by the author's friends. For example: COTTONIUS MATHERUS. ANAGRAM. _Tuos Tecum Ornasti_.