A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 85 



familiar there is a certain amount of cosmopolitanism and 

 would not allow bigotry to become despotism. Manners 

 were more self-respectful, and therefore more respectful of 

 others, and personal sensitiveness was fenced with more of 

 that ceremonial with which society armed itself when it 

 surrendered the ruder protection of the sword. We had 

 not then seen a Governor in his chamber at the State 

 House with his hat on, a cigar in his mouth, and his feet 

 upon the stove. Domestic service, in spite of the proverb, 

 was not seldom an inheritance, nor was household peace 

 dependent on the whim of a foreign armed neutrality in 

 the kitchen. Servant and master were of one stock ; there 

 was decent authority and becoming respect ; the tradition 

 of the Old World lingered after its superstition 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 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 gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing 

 unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathway of some 

 worm from his cradle to his grave; but Quincy s was 



