Philip F. Gura, in The New England Quar- terly (Sept. 1977), Hubbard Hall, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Me. 0401 1
To many 17th-century New Englanders, William Phips (1651-95) epitomized what a good governor should not be. But preacher Cotton Mather found an overriding virtue in Phips's checkered career: his "love for his country ."
Gura, a professor of English at the University of Colorado, finds the appeal to patriotism in Mather's Life of Phips (1697) a fateful updating of the Puritans'...