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Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and
stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the
market-place. First came the music. It comprised a variety of
instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and
played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object
for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the
multitude--that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to
the scene of life that passes before the eye. Little Pearl at
first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the
restless agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence
throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed to be
borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the long heaves and swells
of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer
of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armour of the military
company, which followed after the music, and formed the honorary
escort of the procession. This body of soldiery--which still
sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages
with an ancient and honourable 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 demeanour 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
was strong in him--bestowed it on the white hair and venerable
brow of age--on long-tried integrity--on solid wisdom and
sad-coloured experience--on endowments of that grave and
weighty order which gave 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 in time of
difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a
line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of
character here indicated were well represented in the square cast
of countenance and large physical development of the new colonial
magistrates. So far as a demeanour of natural authority was
concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see
these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House
of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.
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