disorder.”  The use of wigs also, at first denounced by the clergy, was at last countenanced by them:  in portraits later than 1700 they usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752 the tables had so far turned that a church-member in Newbury refused communion because “the pastor wears a wigg.”  Yet Increase Mather thought they played no small part in producing the Boston Fire.  “Monstrous Periwigs, such as some of our church-members indulge in, which make them resemble the Locusts that came out of y’e Bottomless Pit.  Rev. ix. 7, 8,—­and as an eminent Divine calls them, Horrid Bushes of Vanity; such strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and to express Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15.  Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord to kindle fires in all the towns in the country.”

Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a community where every man was expected to have a current supply of religious experiences always ready for circulation.  There was a certain hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a seafaring man, who gave much trouble; and E.F.,—­for they mostly appear by initials,—­who, coming to New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in black, was taken for a minister, and asked to preach:  he was apparently a little insane, and at first talked “demurely,” but at last “railed like Rabshakeh,” Cotton Mather says.  There was also M.J., a Welsh tanner, who finally stole his employer’s leather breeches and set up for a preacher,—­less innocently apparelled than George Fox.  But the worst of all was one bearing the since sainted name of Samuel May.  This vessel of wrath appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel spirit,—­though, indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been “a scandalous fire-ship among the churches.”  Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who knew no Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,—­for (as he indignantly asserts) “there were eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in one very short note I received from him.”  This doubtful personage copied his sermons from a volume by his namesake, Dr. Samuel Bolton,—­“Sam the Doctor and Sam the Dunce,” Mather calls them.  Finally, “this eminent worthy stranger,” Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled with his parish for their slow payments, and “flew out like a Dragon, spitting this among other fire at them:—­’I see, no longer pipe, no longer dance,’—­so that they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had never seen him.”  Then “the guilty fellow, having bubbled the silly neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a sudden was gone,” and Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to have been the worst penalty the man suffered.