A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 97 



planned for white. The same eyes that had looked on 

 Gage's red-coats, 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 Eng- 

 land. Most long lives resemble those threads of gos- 

 samer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly 

 prolonged, scarce visible pathway of some worm from 

 his cradle to his grave ; but Quincy's was strung with 

 seventy active years, each one a rounded bead of useful- 

 ness and service. 



Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type. 

 Since the settlement of the town, there had been a 

 colonel of the Boston regiment in every generation of his 

 family. He lived to see a grandson brevetted with the 

 same title for gallantry in the field. Only child of one 

 among the most eminent .advocates of the Revolution, 

 and who but for his untimely death would have been a 

 leading actor in it, his earliest recollections belonged to 

 the heroic period in the history of his native town. 

 With that history his life was thenceforth intimately 

 united by offices of public trust, as Representative in 

 Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and President of the 

 University, to a period beyond the ordinary span of 

 mortals. Even after he had passed ninety, he would 

 not claim to be emeritus, but came forward to brace his 

 townsmen with a. courage and warm them with a fire 

 younger than their own. The legend of Colonel Goffe 

 at Deerfield became a reality to the eyes of this genera- 

 tion. The New England breed is running out, we are 

 told ! This was in all ways a beautiful and fortunate 

 life, — fortunate in the goods of this world, — fortunate, 

 above all, in the force of character which makes fortune 



