ird and
his advisers for the purpose of keeping them apart forever.

[Sidenote: 1774--General Gage]

An immense number of copies of the Boston Port Bill were sent with
great rapidity all over the colonies. In the fine phrase which we must
needs believe to be Burke's, these had the effect which the poets
ascribe to the Fury's torch; they set the countries through which they
passed in a flame. At Boston and New York "the populace had copies of
the Bill printed upon mourning paper with a black border, which they
cried about the streets under the title of a barbarous, cruel, bloody,
and inhuman murder." In other places the Bill was publicly burned.
All over the Continent great meetings were held, at which, with more or
less vehemence of speech, but with a common enthusiasm and a common
indignation, the Bill was denounced, and the determination to resist it
defiantly asserted. When General Gage arrived on his mission of
administration he found not merely the colony of Massachusetts, but the
whole continent in an uproar. He had to deal with a vast majority of
the people who were in proclaimed resistance to the Act, and who only
differed in the extreme of resistance to which they were prepared
immediately to go, and a minority who either approved or did not
altogether disapprove of the Act. Gage was condemned to the government
not of a cowed, humbled, and friendless province, but of a raging
nation, frantic at the infringement of its rights, and sustained in the
struggle it was resolved to make by the cheer and aid of a league of
sister nations. The flame from the Fury's torch had spread with a
vengeance. Gage was a brave man, an able man, an {166} honorable man;
but for Alexander he was a little over-parted. The difficulties he had
to encounter were too great for him to grapple with; the work he was
meant to do too vast for his hands or the hands of any man. He was
sent out to sway a chastened and degraded province; he found himself
opposed by a defiant people, exalted by injustice and animated by
attack.

{167}

CHAPTER LIII.

THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD."

[Sidenote: 1774--Death of Oliver Goldsmith]

In the early spring that followed upon the winter when the Mohawks of
Boston made tea with salt water, at a time when politicians were busy
fighting over the Boston Port Bill, and neither side dreamed of the
consequences that could come of a decision, one of the gentlest and
sweetest writers of the English