yet they are able to produce but little tangible evidence of his
superiority. It is, no doubt, true that Memory's geese are always swans;
but in the case of a man like Parsons, where the testimony is so various
and concurrent, we cannot help believing that there must have been a
special force of character, a marked alertness and grasp of mind, to
justify the impression he left behind. With the exception of John
Adams, he was probably the most considerable man of his generation in
Massachusetts; and it is not merely the _caruit quia vate sacro_, but
the narrowness of his sphere of action, still further narrowed by the
technical nature of a profession in itself provincial, as compared
with many other fields for the display of intellectual power, that has
hindered him from receiving an amount of fame at all commensurate with
an ability so real and so various.

But the life of a strong man, lived no matter where, and perhaps all
the more if it have been isolated from the noisier events which make so
large a part of history, contains the best material of biography. Judge
Parsons was fortunate in a son capable of doing that well, which, even
if ill done, would have been interesting. A practised writer, the author
of two volumes of eloquent and thoughtful essays, Professor Parsons has
known how to select and arrange his matter with a due feeling of effect
and perspective. When he fails to do this, it is because here and there
the essayist has got the better of the biographer. We are not concerned
here, for example, to know Mr. Parsons's opinions about Slavery, and
we are sure that the sharp insight and decisive judgment of his father
would never have allowed him to be frightened by the now somewhat
weather-beaten scarecrow of danger to the Union.

In the earlier part of the Memoir we get some glimpses of
pre-Revolutionary life in New England, which we hope yet to see
illustrated more fully in its household aspects.[A] The father of
Parsons was precisely one of those country-clergymen who were "passing
rich on forty pounds a year." On a salary of two hundred and eighty
dollars, he brought up a family of seven children, three of whom he sent
to college, and kept a hospitable house.

[Footnote A: Mr. Elliott, in his _New England History_, has wisely
gathered many of those unconsidered trifles which are so important in
forming a just notion of the character of a population. We cannot but
wish that our town-historians, instead o