though stately
enough for college dignitaries and scholarly clergymen, was not one of
those old Tory, Episcopal-church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors
opens directly upon the green, always called the Common; the other,
facing the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk, on the
other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs
and syringas. The honest mansion makes no pretensions. Accessible,
companionable, holding its hand out to all, comfortable, respectable,
and even in its way dignified, but not imposing, not a house for his
Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had not
where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it
has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like
the leaves of the forest. I passed some pleasant hours, a few years
since, in the Registry of Deeds and the Town Records, looking up
the history of the old house. How those dear friends of mine, the
antiquarians, for whose grave councils I compose my features on the
too rare Thursdays when I am at liberty to meet them, in whose human
herbarium the leaves and blossoms of past generations are so carefully
spread out and pressed and laid away, would listen to an expansion of
the following brief details into an Historical Memoir!

The estate was the third lot of the eighth "Squadron" (whatever that
might be), and in the year 1707 was allotted in the distribution of
undivided lands to "Mr. ffox," the Reverend Jabez Fox of Woburn, it may
be supposed, as it passed from his heirs to the first Jonathan Hastings;
from him to his son, the long remembered College Steward; from him in
the year 1792 to the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson, Professor of Hebrew
and other Oriental languages in Harvard College, whose large personality
swam into my ken when I was looking forward to my teens; from him the
progenitors of my unborn self.

I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet,
with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me.
His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me
that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have
pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the
seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed
Christo et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish to find
one's self in an empty saddle; Cotton Mather was misera