elling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single
holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities
at a period of general affliction.

But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly
characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the
market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of
Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived
in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life
of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as
stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had
they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would
have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires,
banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been
impracticable, in the observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine
mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque
and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation,
at such festivals, puts on. There was some shadow of an attempt of
this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political
year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered
splendor, a colorless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had
beheld in proud old London,--we will not say at a royal coronation,
but at a Lord Mayor's show,--might be traced in the customs which our
forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of
magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth--the
statesman, the priest, and the soldier--deemed it a duty then to
assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with
antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public or social
eminence. All came forth, to move in procession before the people's
eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a
government so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in
relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of
rugged industry, which, at all other times, seemed of the same piece
and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the
applicances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the
England of Elizabeth's time, or that of James;--no rude shows of a
theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor
gleeman, with an ape dancing