96 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



atives of those Vikings who, if trade in himber or peltry 

 was dull, would make themselves Dukes of Dublin or 

 Earls of Orkney. If trade pinches the mind, commerce 

 liberalizes it ; and Boston was also advantaged with 

 the neighborhood of the country's oldest College, which 

 maintained the wholesome traditions of culture, — where 

 Homer and Horace are familiar there is a certain amount 

 of cosmopolitanism, — and w^ould not allow bigotry to 

 become despotism. Manners were more self-respectful, 

 and therefore more respectful of others, and personal 

 sensitiveness was fenced w4th 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 w^as household peace dejjendent on 

 the w^him of a foreign aiTiied 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 willingh^ paid to supe- 

 rior culture. What changes, many of them for the bet- 

 ter, some of them surely for the worse, and all of them 

 inevitable, did not Josiah Quincy see in that wellnigh 

 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 colored 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 



