Page:A new England boyhood by Hale, Edward Everett.djvu/15

Rh plicity and ease of a phase of New England life, which has now wholly passed away. I do not flatter myself that I have succeeded in presenting to the reader the simplicity and the dignity of that life, so curiously combined as simplicity and dignity were. Those people, in the little seaport of Boston, lived and moved as if they were people of the most important city of the world. What is more, they meant to make Boston the purest, noblest, and best city in the world. And they lived there in some forms of social life which would have be come princes of sixty-four quarterings, with some which were identical with those of the log-cabin. Every man of them was an American, and believed to the sole of his feet that there was no fit government for men but that of a republic. All the same, their leaders, men and women, were dignified, elegant, and gracious in their bearing and manner; and there was no prince in the world who better understood the bearing and the customs of gentlemen and gentlewomen.

It was a good place in which to be born, and a good place in which to grow to manhood.