94 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



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 

 democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, 

 and self-centred poise that recall the finer types of anti- 

 quity, in whom the public and private man were so 

 wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at 

 home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the 

 hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. 

 The phrase " a great public character," 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 pub- 

 lic affairs. A score of years after the energies of even 

 vigorous men are declining or spent, his mind and char- 

 acter made themselves felt as in their prime. A true 

 pillar of house and state, he stood unflinchingly 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 cfc la Brutus and 

 their pedantic moralities d la Cato Minor, but this man 

 unconsciously was the antique Roman they laboriously 

 went about to be. Others have filled places more con- 

 spicuous, few have made the place they filled so conspicu- 

 ous by an exact and disinterested performance of duty. 



In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son there is 

 something 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 provincial- 

 ism is relative, and where it has a flavor of its own, as 

 in Scotland, it is often agreeable in proportion to its 

 very intensity. The Massachusetts in which Mr. Quin- 

 cy' s habits of thought were acquired was a very different 



