The creative instincts underwent a similar decline. John Cotton and his contemporaries were as eminent in theology as the Puritan ministers in England, and the funeral elegies which were their sole contributions to belles-lettres can stand unashamed side by side with similar English performances. But as the Restoration succeeded the Commonwealth, and in turn was succeeded by “Anna’s reign,” New England neither evolved a literary class to follow, at a distance, the modes of the capital nor produced, as the English provinces were doing, an occasional wit who could leave home and make his literary fortunes in London. For that there was needed a stronger secular taste than New England had. Literature settled down to sermons. Instead of Marlowe’s tragedy, people read the prose _History of the damnable Life and deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus_; the earliest play printed in New England seems to have been Lillo’s edifying _George Barnwell_, issued by James Franklin in the _Weekly Journal_ in 1732. And yet the importers’ lists which Mr. Wright has unearthed make it clear that for a long time such plays and romances as Sidney’s _Arcadia_, Head’s _English Rogue_, _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Guy of Warwick_, and _Reynard the Fox_ had been coming over in considerable numbers. John Dunton—an unreliable fellow, it is true—tells that during his stay in Boston in 1686 he had a customer who bought such books, “which to set off the better, she wou’d ask for Books of _Gallantry_.” In 1713 Cotton Mather was so much annoyed by the “foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry into all parts of the Countrey,” that he wanted, “by way of Antidote,” to issue “poetical Composures full of Piety”—including some of the “excellent _Watts’s_ Hymns.” And shortly thereafter the influence of the English wits had become so strong that Benjamin Franklin is seen to begin his literary career with imitations of the _Spectator_ and that Mather Byles, Harvard’s honor, and New England’s hope, Bids fair to rise and sing and rival Pope, as a poetical friend neatly put it at the time. THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL