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.
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