i2 4 LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



pont wrote the best of his patriotic verse, where 

 Richard Hildreth began his work as a historian, 

 where many another author of good repute was 

 born, or lived, or died, where Harriet Prescott 

 Spofford still lives and adds to her literary fame, 

 should recall to the minds of many of us only the 

 name of the preposterous " Lord " Timothy Dex- 

 ter. After all, perhaps it is style alone which sur- 

 vives. Dexter's style was like nothing which ever 

 went before or has yet come after, in print. It 

 takes an inventive mind to find any meaning at all 

 in what he wrote, sense being as scarce as punc- 

 tuation, of which there was none. Yet the trail 

 of Lord Timothy Dexter is still eagerly followed 

 through Newburyport annals by people who for- 

 get that John Pierpont ever lived, and we all gloat 

 over the punctuation marks added in a solid page 

 at the end of his second edition, to be used as the 

 reader's fancy dictates. 



Lord Dexter lived in the solid, dignified upper 

 portion of the town. His mind and character 

 belonged in the queer junk in the little shop win- 

 dows down near the water front. I can fancy 

 John Pierpont drawing the clear, denunciatory 



