A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 83 



perhaps, tries this by pressure in more directions, and with 

 a more continuous strain, than any other form of society. 

 In Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained 

 and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure de 

 mocracy 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 sin 

 cerity of nature that dignified the hearth carried also a 

 charm of homeliness into the forum. The phrase &quot;a great 

 public character,&quot; 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, hi?, 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 a la 

 Brutus, and their pedantic moralities a la Oato 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 

 relative, and where it has a flavour of its own, as in Scot 

 land, it is often agreeable in proportion to its very inten 

 sity. 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 



