This follows a corresponding likeness in Cotton Mather’s _Parentator_, Boston, 1724 (Harv. Col. lib., 10397.17). Cf. Edmund Calamy’s ed. of _Memoirs of the life of the late Rev. Increase Mather_, London, 1725 (Ibid., 10397.16). Engravings are noted in the _Catal. Cab. MS. Hist. Soc._, p. 35; and of the painted portraits in the same catalogue, no. 23 is of Mather. There is an original painting in the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which is engraved in the _Mem. Hist. of Boston_, i. 587.] While the provincial charter had been thus in jeopardy, the father of it died. The most conspicuous of New Englanders in his day, though his fame is somewhat overshadowed by his son’s, breathed his last, when Increase Mather died, on August 23, 1723, at the advanced age of eighty-four. When he was buried, a hundred and threescore scholars of Harvard College walked in such a procession as never before attended the burial of a New England divine. In most respects he was the greatest of a race which was born with traits of prowess. His learning was large, far better assimilated than that of the son, and his power over men far happier and more consistent. His industry was enormous; he sometimes worked in his study sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. What Cotton Mather called the “tonitruous cogency” of his pulpit discourse was often alarming to the timid, but not always effective for the mass. The people grew to be disenthralled in large numbers. There was a growing belief that there could be graces even in dogma,—a gospel that never a Mather preached. The rude Bay Psalm Book, and the nasal cadence of the meeting-house, were beginning to pass when the Franklins, in that obnoxious sheet the _Courant_, were printing the hymns of Isaac Watts.