holesome traditions
of culture,--where Homer and Horace are familiar there is a certain
amount of cosmopolitanism,--and would not allow bigotry to become
despotism. Manners were more self-respectful, and therefore more
respectful of others, and personal sensitiveness was fenced with 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 was household peace dependent on the whim
of a foreign armed 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 willingly paid to superior culture. What
changes, many of them for the better, 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
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 England. Most long lives resemble those threads
of gossamer, 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 usefulness 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 gra