74 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



had passed away. There was an aristocracy such as is 

 healthful in a well-ordered community, founded on public 

 service, and hereditary so long as the virtue which was its 

 patent was not escheated. The clergy, no longer hedged by 

 the reverence exacted by sacerdotal caste, were more than 

 repaid by the consideration willingly paid to superior culture. 

 What changes, many of them for the better, some of them 

 surely for the worse, and all of them inevitable, did not 

 Josiah Quincy see in that well-nigh secular life which linked 

 the war of independence to the war of nationality ! We 

 seemed to see a type of them the other day in a coloured 

 man standing with an air of comfortable self-possession while 

 his boots were brushed by a youth of catholic neutral tint, 

 but whom nature had planned for white. The same eyes 

 that had looked on Gage s redcoats, saw Colonel Shaw s 

 negro regiment march out of Boston in the national blue. 

 Seldom has a life, itself actively associated with public 

 affairs, spanned so wide a chasm for the imagination. 

 Oglethorpe s offers a parallel the aide-de-camp of Prince 

 Eugene calling on John Adams, American Ambassador to 

 England. Most long lives resemble those threads of gos 

 samer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly pro 

 longed, scarce visible pathway of some worm from his 

 cradle to his grave ; but Quincy s was strung with seventy 

 active years, each one a rounded bead of usefulness and 

 service. 



Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type. Since 

 the settlement of the town, there had been a colonel of the 

 Boston regiment in every generation of his family. He 

 lived to see a grandson brevetted with the same title for 

 gallantry in the field. Only child of one among the most 

 eminent advocates of the Revolution, and who but for his 

 untimely death would have been a leading actor in it, his 

 earliest recollections belonged to the heroic period in the 

 history of his native town. With that history his life was 

 thenceforth intimately united by offices of public trust, as 

 Representative in Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and 

 President of the University, to a period beyond the ordinary 

 span of mortals. Even after he had passed ninety, he would 

 not claim to be emeritus, but came forward to brace his 

 townsmen with a courage and warm them with a fire younger 

 than their own. The legend of Colonel Goffe at Deerfield 



