72 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



approach to a pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a 

 firmness, unity, and self-centred poise that recall the finer 

 types of antiquity, in whom the public and private man was 

 so wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at home, 

 for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the hearth 

 carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. The 

 phrase a great public character, once common, seems to be 

 going out of fashion, perhaps because there are fewer 

 examples of the thing. It fits Josiah Quincy exactly. Active 

 in civic and academic duties till beyond the ordinary period 

 of man, at fourscore and ten his pen, voice, and venerable 

 presence were still efficient in public affairs. A score of 

 years after the energies of even vigorous men are declining 

 or spent, his mind and character made themselves felt as in 

 their prime. A true pillar of house and state, he stood un 

 flinchingly upright under whatever burden might be laid 

 upon him. The French Revolutionists aped what was itself 

 but a parody of the elder republic, with their hair d la 

 Brutus, and their pedantic moralities d la Cato Minor, but 

 this man unconsciously was the antique Roman they 

 laboriously went about to be. Others have filled places 

 more conspicuous, few have made the place they filled so 

 conspicuous by an exact and disinterested performance 

 of duty. 



In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son there is some 

 thing of the provincialism of which we have spoken as 

 inherent in most American works of the kind. His was a 

 Boston life in the strictest sense. But provincialism is rela 

 tive, and where it has a flavour of its own, as in Scotland, it 

 is often agreeable in proportion to its very intensity. The 

 Massachusetts in which Mr. Quincy s habits of thought were 

 acquired was a very different Massachusetts from that in 

 which we of later generations have been bred. Till after he 

 had passed middle life, Boston was more truly a capital than 

 any other city in America, before or since, except possibly 

 Charleston. The acknowledged head of New England, with 

 a population of well-nigh purely English descent, mostly 

 derived from the earlier emigration, with ancestral traditions 

 and inspiring memories of its own, it had made its name 

 familiar in both worlds, and was both historically and 

 politically more important than at any later period. The 

 Revolution had not interrupted, but rather given a freer 



