ich were without lights. The Lieutenant-Governor summoned such
of the members of the Council as were at hand, and the justices of the
county, to meet him at the Council-Chamber; he requested Dalrymple to
order the force under his command "to be ready to march when the
occasion required"; and he "kept persons employed to give him immediate
notice of every new motion of the mob." Dalrymple, with a soldier's
alacrity, complied with the official request; but the mob went on its
course, for "none of the justices nor the sheriff," writes Hutchinson,
"thought it safe for them to restrain so great a body of people in a
dark evening,"--and the only work done by the soldiers was to protect
Mien, the printer, who, being goaded into discharging a pistol among the
crowd, fled to the main guard for safety. The finale of this mob is thus
related by Hutchinson:--"Between eight and nine o'clock they dispersed
of their own account, and the town was quiet."

The intrepid and yet prudent course of the popular leaders and of the
people, in standing manfully for the common cause in presence of the
British troops, was now eliciting the warmest encomiums on the town from
the friends of liberty in England and in the Colonies. The generous
praise was copied into the local journals, and, so far from being
received with assumption, became a powerful incentive to worthy action.
"Your Bostonians," a Southern letter runs, "shine with renewed lustre.
Their last efforts were indeed like themselves, full of wisdom,
prudence, and magnanimity. Such a conduct must silence every pretended
suspicion, and baffle every vile attempt to calumniate their noble and
generous struggles in the cause of American Liberty." "So much wisdom
and virtue," says a New-Hampshire letter, "as hath been conspicuous in
the Bostonians, will not go unrewarded. You will in all respects
increase until you become the glory of New England, the pride of British
kings, the scourge of tyrants, and the joy of the whole earth," "The
patriotism of Boston," says another letter, "will be revered through
every age." One of these tributes, from a Southern journal, in the
Boston papers of December 18, 1769, runs,--"The noble conduct of the
Representatives, Selectmen, and principal merchants of Boston, in
defending and supporting the rights of America and the British
Constitution, cannot fail to excite love and gratitude in the heart of
every worthy person in the British empire. They discover a dig