A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 73 



when you married again, you have been a step-mother to 

 us. Put on your spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have 

 grown, and changed likewise. You would not let us 

 darken your doors if you could help it. We know that 

 perfectly well. But pray, when we look to be treated as 

 men, don t shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to 

 us any longer. 



&quot; Do, child, go to it grandam, child ; 

 Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will 

 Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig ! &quot; 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER* 



IT is the misfortune of American biography that it must 

 needs be more or less provincial, and that, contrary to what 

 might have been predicted, this quality in it predominates 

 in proportion as the country grows larger. Wanting any 

 great and acknowledged centre of national life and thought, 

 our expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation than 

 growth ; reputations must be hammered out thin to cover 

 so wide a surface, and the substance of most hardly holds 

 out to the boundaries of a single state. Our very history 

 wants unity, and down to the Revolution the attention is 

 wearied and confused by having to divide itself among 

 thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred 011 

 a single clue. A sense of remoteness and seclusion comes 

 over us as we read, and we cannot help asking ourselves, 

 &quot; Were not these things done in a corner ?&quot; Notoriety may 

 be achieved in a narrow sphere, but fame demands for its 

 evidence a more distant and prolonged reverberation. To 

 the world at large we were but a short column of figures in 

 the corner of a blue-book, New England exporting so much 

 salt fish, timber, and Medford rum, Virginia so many 

 hogsheads of tobacco, and buying with the proceeds a 

 certain amount of English manufactures. The story of 

 * The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son. 



