chy as the tenth
horn of the Beast in Revelations,--a horn that has set more sober wits
dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those were days, we are inclined
to think, of more solid and elegant hospitality than our own,--the
elegance of manners, at once more courtly and more frugal, of men who
had better uses for wealth than merely to display it. Dinners have more
courses now, and, like the Gascon in the old story, who could not see
the town for the houses, we miss the real dinner in the multiplicity of
its details. We might seek long before we found so good cheer, so good
company, or so good talk as our fathers had at Lieutenant-Governor
Winthrop's or Senator Cabot's.

We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quincy the wrong of picking out in advance
all the plums in his volume, leaving to the reader only the less savory
mixture that held them together,--a kind of filling unavoidable in books
of this kind, and too apt to be what boys at boarding-school call
_stick-jaw_, but of which there is no more than could not be helped
here, and that light and palatable. But here and there is a passage
where we cannot refrain, for there is a smack of Jack Horner in all of
us, and a reviewer were nothing without it. Josiah Quincy was born in
1772. His father, returning from a mission to England, died in sight of
the dear New England shore three years later. His young widow was worthy
of him, and of the son whose character she was to have so large a share
in forming. There is something very touching and beautiful in this
little picture of her which Mr. Quincy drew in his extreme old age.

"My mother imbibed, as was usual with the women of the period, the
spirit of the times. Patriotism was not then a profession, but an
energetic principle beating in the heart and active in the life. The
death of my father, under circumstances now the subject of history, had
overwhelmed her with grief. She viewed him as a victim in the cause of
freedom, and cultivated his memory with veneration, regarding him as a
martyr, falling, as did his friend Warren, in the defence of the
liberties of his country. These circumstances gave a pathos and
vehemence to her grief, which, after the first violence of passion had
subsided, sought consolation in earnest and solicitous fulfilment of
duty to the representative of his memory and of their mutual affections.
Love and reverence for the memory of his father was early impressed on
the mind of her son, and worn into his he