Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/342

 must have been really startling. From parson to pot-boy, every man indulged in his own crochets and styles, his own locutions and mannerisms, which were the combined outgrowth of environment, choice, necessity, and carelessness, and which, seeing that they transgressed no moral law, were accepted as naturally as the vagaries of the weather. One may even suspect that many an ancient worthy gloried in his idiosyncrasies, cultivated them as assiduously as any modern celebrity, and capitalized them with no little success. Thus characters flourished amain on every hand, and Harvard College had its full share, for the simple reason that it could not avoid them. The Yard was as full of characters as a novel by Dickens.

With these harmless, healthy, and enlivening variations among its component elements, society remained well content, until that Revolutionary Era which altered manners and customs quite as much as politics and government. Then the new cult of monotony arose and steadily overpowered picturesqueness and originality. If we accept the Teufelsdröckh theory that man’s outward garments are an index to his philosophy, we may say that the period of transition in this locality extended from 1765, when the first pair of pantaloons (those fatally unromantic envelopes) appeared in Cambridge, to 1819, when for the last time an ancient