ession. This body of soldiery--which still
sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with
an ancient and honorable fame--was composed of no mercenary materials.
Its ranks were filled with gentlemen, who felt the stirrings of
martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms,
where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the
science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military
character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member
of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their services in the Low
Countries and on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won
their title to assume the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire
array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding
over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern
display can aspire to equal.

And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the
military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye. Even
in outward demeanor, they showed a stamp of majesty that made the
warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age
when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the
massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a
great deal more. The people possessed, by hereditary right, the
quality of reverence; which, in their descendants, if it survive at
all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force,
in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for
good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day, the
English settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and
all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and
necessity of reverence were strong in him--bestowed it on the white
hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid
wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the
general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen,
therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeers,--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a
ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had
fortitude and self-reliance, and, i