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ch. add. unto the number of six, wh. he had bef." Authority for such
improb. he design. his reader should infer, I suppose, from tell. in the
begin. of the sentence," by the d. of that Mr. Launce, wh. is yet liv. among
us, Sherman had no less than, &c." To this fable full credit was long
giv. bec. it obt. the sober sanction of Hutch. I. 19, a relative of Mather,
more than once misled by him. But in our day, a desend. of Sherman
by this w. aft. bestow. large investigat. with adequate critical skill, puts
the result, 1851, with "special wonder" in Geneal. Reg. 307, as not
"establ. the Darcy lineage." The writer refers to an emin. Eng. antiquary,
wh. had been very slow to reject the tale even of Mather, or to
distrust so judicious an auth. as Hutch. but pursu. the inq. long, and
wrote me the issue, three yrs. later," aft. all the attent. I have paid to
Mr. Willards point, there is no satisfacto. conclus. arr. at; and I am
inclin. to think, that there was real. no particle of truth in the report wh.
Mather had receiv. and has giv. circul. to." Equal distrust is more
natur. felt a. the number of ch. that led our ecclesiast. hist.; to dilate in
eight and twenty lines on "such Polytokie," as he tersely or foolishly
calls it. Suspicion arises from this fact, that exactly one less than half
of the twenty-six ch. giv. to both ws. have never found a name either in
rec. or benevol. tradit. See Bond, 432. Yet one more, Benjamin, was
prob. lost from the rec. (by wearing out the paper) of b. 23 Apr. 1661,
and d. 4 Oct. 1662. By the sec. w. wh. long outliv. him, d. 9 Mar.
1710, we see, then, ten ch. or at most eleven, instead of twenty, were b.
and whence could the error arise? Aft. the b. of the first ch. the f. was
always at Watertown, there as min. he would make rec. of bapt. of his
own, as well as of others; but the rec. is lost, and we have to seek in
town rec. for entry of births; and fortunate. his cous. of the same name
was many yrs. the clk. Five only are thus found, Abigail, 3 Feb. 1648;
Joanna, 3 Sept. 1652; Mary, 5 Mar. 1657; Grace, 10 Mar. 1659;
nd John, 17 Mar. 1660; but with more or less confidencc, beside Benjamin,
five more can be read in Bond (tho. the first two. are count. by
him as of first w.), James, bef. ment. Abiah, Elizabeth, Esther, and Mercy.
Sometimes I have suspsect. that the ch. of both contempo. Johns were
count. for one by the informant of Mather, and very exact is the rec. of
seven of capt. John, part. bef. part. aft. he bec. clk. and so by office
bound to kn. bs. ds. and ms. No weight can he denied to such surmise
from the fact of differ. names of the ws. of Rev. John and capt. John,
for the prefix of respect in his less likely to be omit. than the bapt.
name in w. With all his assidu. Bond could not satisfy hims. How
Mather got this story of the friutful vine, conject. would be various, if
anyways reasona. The eldest d. of this sec. w. could not have told it to
him, for she d. the yr. of Mather's bachelor's degr. 20 yrs. bef. his book
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