Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

[29] of sense and energy; and his descendants now often occupy high social positions, very likely employing in some capacity the descendants of those who paid wages to their progenitors. Even at that time, the “hired men” held their own at the town meeting and in the muster field; and President Quincy, the dignified head of the college, was only major in the militia regiment of which his man-servant was colonel. It was at this period and under these conditions that the “Biglow papers” were written. The dialect of Lowell's father and his mates, on the other hand, was only too scholastic and academic; he who doubts this has merely to consult the early volumes of the North American Review.

It was perhaps fortunate, on the whole, as being an essential part of the broader training of Cambridge authors, that the population and traditions of the town were not wholly Puritanic, or rather that it included some representative of that gypsy-like element which has here and there cropped out, in a repressed minority,--a sort of submerged stratum,--in New England ever since the days of Morton of Merry Mount. It has