seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. In more deliberate literature there are various more conscious pictures of it later. To mention only a few, Mrs. Stowe's "Oldtown Folks" gives an admirably vivid account of the Norfolk County country about 1800; Whittier's "SnowBound" preserves in "Flemish pictures" the Essex County farmers of a few years later; and Lowell's papers on Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" and on "A Great Public Character" Josiah Quincy-give more stately pictures of Middlesex County at about the same time. The incidental glimpses of life in Jacob Abbott's Rollo Books are artlessly true of Yankee life in the 40's; Miss Lucy Larcom's "New England Girlhood" and Dr. Edward Everett Hale's more cursory "New England Boyhood" carry the story from a little earlier to a little later. Miss Alcott's "Little Women" does for the '60's what "Rollo " does for the '40's. And the admirable tales of Miss Mary Wilkins and of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett portray the later New England country in its decline. In all these works, and in the many others of which we may take them as typical, you will find people of quality familiarly mingling with others, but tacitly recognised as socially superior almost like an hereditary aristocracy.

A characteristic example of the family discipline which ensued is preserved in the diary of a Boston merchant who was born before the Revolution and died at about the time when the "Knickerbocker Gallery" enriched the literature of New York. After the good old Yankee fashion, this gentleman had a very large family. One of his younger sons had fallen out of favour; and five of his elder children, all married and in respectably independent positions, desired to intercede for their erring brother. They were afraid, it appears, to broach the subject in conversation; so meeting together with their husbands and wives, they drew up a paper signed by all ten, praying in diplomatically formal terms for

parental leniency. This paper was gravely presented without comment to the head of the family. He received it with dignified surprise, and kept it under prayerful consideration for a number of days. Finally, having deliberately made up his mind that paternal authority must not be questioned even by adult children, he sent for the signers one by one, to demanl that the signatures be separately erased; and apparently all but one of the signers regretfully but dutifully obeyed. Doubtless an excessive incident of the patriarchal rigidity of New England life about 1830, this is not unique; and it is clearly a thing which could have occurred only in a society of which the structural traditions were immemorially fixed.

Such fixity of social structure, developed during two centuries of geographical and social isolation, could not help resulting in characteristic ways of thinking and feeling. There can be little doubt that the deepest traits of Yankee character had their origin in the intense religious convictions of the immigrants. The dominant class of pristine New England were the clergy, whose temper so permeated our seventeenth-century literature. Their creed was sternly Calvinistic; and Calvinism imposes upon whoever accepts it the duty of constant, terribly serious self-searching. The question before every individual who holds this grim faith is whether he can discern within himself the signs which shall prove him probably among the elect of God. The one certain sign of his regeneration may be found in spontaneous consciousness of ability to use his will in accordance with that of God; in other words, the elect, and no one else, can be admitted by unmerited divine grace into something like spiritual communion with God himself. God himself embodies absolute right and absolute truth. What the strenuously self-searching inner life of serious Yankees aimed to attain, then, was immutable conviction of absolute truth.

This it sought under the guidance of a tyrannically dominant priestly class. Till long after 1800, the orthodox

clergy of New England maintained their formal eminence almost unbroken. In every village the settled minister, who usually held his office for life, was a man apart; but he was in constant correspondence with his fellows elsewhere. If by any chance a New England parson happened to go away from home, he naturally put up at the minister's in every town where he passed a night. As Dr. Holmes once put the case, the Yankee clergy formed something like a Brahmin caste, poor in the goods of this world, but autocratic in power.

A fact about them which is often forgotten, however, profoundly influenced New England life. Once in office, they exercised tyrannical authority; but to exercise this, they had to get into office and to stay there. In most parts of the world a dominant hierarchy is self-perpetuating: it is the central authority of the Roman Church, for example, which appoints priests all over the world; it is the distortion of this system effected in England by the Reformation which allows the English gentry still to nominate the rectors of parishes adjacent to their estates. In New England, on the other hand, the congregations themselves called their ministers from the beginning, just as they do still. At first, to be sure, the only actual members of New England churches were people who had satisfied the clergy that they were probably elect; but once church members, they had a right to choose their minister by majority vote. The elect of God, as somebody has phrased it, became the electors of God's chosen. So even if the clergy were so conspicuously the chosen vessels of the Lord, the members of the New England churches may be described as the potters by whose hands the Lord was content to see modelled the vessels of his choice.

From this state of things resulted a palpable check on the power of the old Yankee ministers. In one aspect they were autocratic tyrants; in another they were subject to the tyrannical power of an irresponsible majority vote. The kind of

thing which sometimes resulted has always been familiar in America. The first President of Harvard College was compelled to resign his office because he believed in baptism by immersion; after twenty years of service, Jonathan Edwards was deposed from the pulpit of Northampton at the instance of a disaffected congregation; and there were plenty of more fleshly troubles which brought about similar results. The second John Cotton, for example, the son of the first minister of Boston and himself minister of Plymouth, was forced to leave his pulpit under circumstances which may have suggested to Hawthorne the story of "The Scarlet Letter," and though he asserted his innocence to the end, he died obscurely in the Carolinas. If the old New England clergy, in fact, felt bound to watch and guard their congregations, whose errors they denounced with all the solemnity of divine authority, the congregations from the beginning returned the compliment. They watched, they criticised, they denounced errors of the clergy almost as strenuously as the clergy watched and criticised and denounced theirs.

One can see why this state of things was unavoidable. Sincere Calvinists believed that divine grace vouchsafed only to the elect the power of perceiving absolute truth. The elect, chosen at God's arbitrary pleasure, might just as probably be found among the laity as the unregenerate might be found among the clergy. And any mistake anywhere in the system was no trivial matter; it literally meant hell-fire. The deepest fact in the personal life of oldest New England, then, on the part of clergy and laity alike, was this intensely earnest, reciprocally tyrannical, lifelong search for absolute truth.

Toward the period of the American Revolution the mercantile prosperity of Boston had tended to develop in the capital city of New England the social class familiar to us in the portraits of Copley; and their manners were becoming superficially like those of their contemporary England. The

Boston gentry of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, were a wealthier class, and in closer contact with the old world than any had been before their time. In various aspects, then, it is probable that the society which Copley painted was beginning to lose some characteristic native traits. If these were momentarily disappearing from the surface of fashionable New England life, however, they remained a little beneath it in all their pristine force. The literary history of the Revolution shows that the arguments of the Tories may be distinguished from those of the Revolutionists by a pretty sharp line. The temper of that class which the Revolution overthrew was marked by strong attachment to established forms of law. The temper of that revolutionary party which ultimately triumphed was marked, despite respectful recognition of legal precedent, by a more instinctive liking for absolute right. In this revolutionary attachment to absolute right, there is something more analogous to the unquestioning faith in absolute truth which marked the ancestral Calvinists than we can discern in that respect for law and order which had become the dominant sentiment of the Tories. However debatable the suggestion may be, then, the work of the Revolution in New England sometimes looks like the reassertion of the old native type in a society which for a little while had seemed to be yielding precedence to persons of somewhat more extensive sympathy.

An accidental fact familiar to people who know Boston will illustrate this. Copley painted the Boston gentry of his time. Forty or fifty years later the gentry then controlling the destinies of New England were painted by Gilbert Stuart. Many old Boston families still preserve Copley portraits as heirlooms; many, too, similarly preserve portraits by Stuart; and a familiar passage in the first section of Holmes's "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" describes as among the essential possessions of a man of family in Boston portraits by both of these masters. Whoever knows modern Boston, however, will