witchcraft prosecutions followed him to the last.  He had forfeited the sympathy of his clerical brethren by his obstinate refusal to take their advice.  They earnestly, over and over again, expostulated against his prolonging the controversy with the people of Salem Village, besought him to relinquish it, and promised him, if he would, to provide an eligible settlement elsewhere.  They actually did provide one.  But he rejected their counsels and persuasions, in expressions of ill-concealed bitterness.  So that, when he was finally driven away, they felt under no obligations to befriend him; and with his eminent abilities he eked out a precarious and inadequate maintenance for himself and family, in feeble settlements in outskirt towns, during the rest of his days.

It is difficult to describe the character of this unfortunate man.  Just as is the condemnation which facts compel history to pronounce, I have a feeling of relief in the thought, that, before the tribunal to which he so long ago passed, the mercy we all shall need, which comprehends all motives and allows for all infirmities, has been extended to him, in its infinite wisdom and benignity.

He was a man of uncommon abilities, of extraordinary vivacity and activity of intellect.  He does not appear to have been wilfully malevolent; although somewhat reckless in a contest, he was not deliberately untruthful; on the contrary, there is in his statements a singular ingenuousness and fairness, seldom to be found in a partisan, much more seldom in a principal.  Although we get almost all we know of the examinations of accused parties in the witchcraft proceedings, and of his long contentions with his parish, from him, there is hardly any ground to regret that the parties on the other side had no friends to tell their story.  A transparency of character, a sort of instinctive incontinency of mind, which made him let out every thing, or a sort of blindness which prevented his seeing the bearings of what was said and done, make his reports the vehicles of the materials for the defence of the very persons he was prosecuting.  I know of no instance like it.  His style is lucid, graphic, lively, natural to the highest degree; and whatever he describes, we see the whole, and, as it were, from all points of view.  Language flowed from his pen with a facility, simplicity, expressiveness, and accuracy, not surpassed or often equalled.  He wrote as men talk, using colloquial expressions without reserve, but always to the point.  When we read, we hear him; abbreviating names, and clipping words, as in the most familiar and unguarded conversation.  He was not hampered by fear of offending the rules which some think necessary to dignify composition.  In his off-hand, free and easy, gossiping entries in the church-book, or in his carefully prepared productions, like the “Meditations for Peace,” read before his church and the dissatisfied brethren, we have specimens of plain good English, in its most