88 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



that it is pleasant to meet him dismounted for once. In 

 the same way we get a card of invitation to a dinner of 

 sixty covers at John Hancock s, and see the rather light- 

 weighted great man wheeled round the room (for he had 

 adopted Lord Chatham s convenient trick of the gout) to 

 converse with his guests. It another place we are presented, 

 with Mr. Merry, the English Minister, to Jefferson, whom 

 we find in an unofficial costume of studied slovenliness, 

 intended as a snub to haughty Albion. Slippers down at 

 heel and a dirty shirt become weapons of diplomacy and 

 threaten more serious war. Thus many a door into the 

 past, long irrevocably shut upon us, is set ajar, and we of 

 the younger generation on the landing catch peeps of 

 distinguished men, and bits of their table-talk. We drive 

 in from Mr. Lyman s beautiful seat at Walthara (unique 

 at that day in its stately swans and half shy, half familiar 

 deer) with John Adams, who tells us that Dr. Priestley 

 looked on the French monarchy as the tenth horn of the 

 Beast in Revelation a horn that has set more sober wits 

 dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those were days, 

 we are inclined to think, of more solid and elegant 

 hospitality than our own the elegance of manners, at once 

 more courtly and more frugal, of men who had better uses 

 for wealth than merely to display it. Dinners have more 

 courses now, and like the Gascon in the old story, who 

 could not see the town for the houses, we miss the real 

 dinner in the multiplicity of its details. We might seek 

 long before we found so good cheer, so good company, or 

 so good talk as our fathers had at Lieutenant-Governor 

 Winthrop s or Senator Cabot s. 



We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quincy the wrong of 

 picking out in advance all the plums in his volume, leaving 

 to the reader only the less savoury mixture that held them 

 together a kind of filling unavoidable in books of this 

 kind, and too apt to be what boys at boarding-school call 

 stick-jaw, but of which there is no more than could not be 

 helped here, and that light and palatable. But here and 

 there is a passage where we cannot refrain, for there is a 



