the Governor of New Jersey, and now for eight years
had been Governor of Massachusetts. He was a scholar, and kept his
memory of Alma Mater fresh. He loved literature and science, could write
elegies in Latin and Greek, used to say that he could repeat the whole
of Shakspeare, and had such gifts of conversation as to charm the social
circle. His politics were of the Oxford school, and old at that. He
looked upon the people with distrust, and upon the king with veneration:
the people had good claim to be well governed, and British Imperialism
had the divine right to govern them well. He was a good hater of
republican institutions; habitually spoke of the local self-government
as a trained mob; and to it (he was not far from right here) he ascribed
the temper of the community which he was set to care for and to rule. It
was vexatious to his Tory spirit to see the democratic element, which
had excluded primogeniture and the hereditary principle and large landed
estates, so firmly bedded here, as if for a mighty superstructure; and
his reform plans tended to a change to centralization. It was a marvel
to him, that this work, which he deemed essential to the maintenance of
British power here, had not been begun long before,--that Charles II.
had not made a clean sweep of the little New England republics. He urged
that this ought to be done now,--that more general governments ought
to take their place, with executives having vice-regal powers; and of
course, being English, he urged that they should be moulded by England
into a shape as nearly as possible like England and for the benefit of
England, and thus be made homogeneous. He sighed to impose the dazzle of
a miniature St. James on reality-loving New England: as though the soil
which had been furrowed for a race of sovereigns could grow a crop of
lords; as though the Norman _role_ of privilege could be engrafted on a
society imbued with the Saxon spirit of equality: and he clinched the
absurdity of his thought by uttering the prediction, that, though the
people might bluster a little when such reform was proposed, yet they
never would resist by force; and if they did, a demonstration of British
power, such as the presence of the King's troops in a few coast-towns
and the occupation of a few harbors by the royal navy, would soon settle
the contest.

As such an arrogant official, from yet unsealed Oxford heights, thus
paternally looked down over Boston and New England, he co