FRANCIS PARKMAN. 447 



faults and errors, to be present good, for the sake of conceivable, but 

 in no wise certain, future benefit. The trait I have in mind, which 

 pervaded his serious talk, animates his well known writings about 

 Woman's Suffrage. When it came to talking of the Mathers, however, 

 I found, as I had found before, that he could not in any way share my 

 sympathy for the conquered orthodoxy of New England. Their 

 narrowness, their pettiness, their limits, their tyranny, and above all 

 their absurdities, were to him almost the sum of their character. 

 Sewall's Diary either amused or provoked him. What seemed to me 

 the noble side of it — the passionate eagerness to preserve unaltered 

 what the Puritans believed to be their divinely sanctioned system of 

 faith and government — Mr. Parkman could not quite appreciate or 

 care for. He did not like the Puritans ; and what he did not like 

 he could fervently condemn. He could not feel, as I felt, that what I 

 liked best in him — his wholesome conservatism of impulse — differed 

 from what I liked in them only as the nineteenth century differs from 

 the seventeenth. In truth, I take it, this instinctive dislike of Puri- 

 tan dogma and character marked him as a man of an older generation 

 than at first he seemed. He was old enough to remember the days 

 w r hen, in New England, orthodox Calvinistic bigotry was actually 

 dangerous to the freedom of thought in which both he and I believed. 

 So to him the Puritans were once for all what Secessionists are to tho 

 surviving Republicans of the early days. 



One more passage in the talk of that evening I remember. Speak- 

 ing somehow about the time of the Rebellion, he said very simply that 

 to his mind one of the chiefly deplorable things about our civil war 

 was that it had disturbed, had dimmed, the concrete ideal of character 

 and conduct traditionally kept before the youth of America. Up 

 to the war, the one great ideal figure had always been the figure 

 of Washington, — a figure alike worthy for its moral dignity and for 

 its personal. Since the war, he said, we have heard too little of 

 Washington ; that is almost the worst thing the war has done for us. 

 For the less, as Americans, we think of Washington, the worse for 

 America. 



So he talked on ; and by and by I took leave of him in the dusk. 

 I never saw him again. 



Too personal for record these slight remembrances may seem. Yet, 

 if they serve to tell how the solemnly traditional personage called 

 " Parkman" could merge insensibly into the friend whose loss came 

 as a personal grief, they may perhaps serve, in time to come, better 

 to preserve his memory than if they had been left unwritten. 



1894. Barrett Wexdell. 



