The History of Massachusetts by the pen of this man has sterling merits, and is of great value. That work and the bestowal of so many high offices upon him indicate that his abilities, acquisitions, and performances were of high order. His comments upon subjects which he discussed, and facts which he presented, were prevailingly fair, and very instructive. When he perceived--and he generally did--the genuine significance of his facts, reasoned from them _all_, and allowed to each its proper weight, he was a spirited, lucid, and valuable interpreter and guide. But when he encountered and adduced extraordinary facts, which baffled his power to account for in harmony with his prejudgments and fixed conclusions as to where natural agents and forces cease to act, he could very skillfully keep in abeyance the most distinguishing and significant aspects of such troublesome materials. That damaging moral weakness which let him write letters which he never sent, for the purpose of exhibiting them as evidence of his support of the popular cause, perhaps also let him be other than manly and frank when he encountered a certain class of facts which seemed to him "more than natural." The whole subject of witchcraft was nettlesome to him. His pen very often indicated a testy, disturbed, and sometimes a contemptuous mover when it characterized persons who had been charged with that crime; and concerning such he recorded many hasty and unsatisfactory opinions and conclusions. A glimpse at the probable and almost necessary state of public opinion and knowledge concerning spiritual forces and agents about the middle of the eighteenth century, will detect serious difficulties besetting any witchcraft historian's path at that time, and dispose us to look in clemency upon his hypotheses and conclusions, even though they be far from satisfactory.