We think it one result of their great freedom from any strait-laced conventional ideas, that no point of character is more frequently noticed in the subjects of these sketches than wit and humor.  New England ministers never held it a sin to laugh; if they did, some of them had a great deal to answer for; for they could scarce open their mouths without dropping some provocation to a smile.  An ecclesiastical meeting was always a merry season; for there never were wanting quaint images, humorous anecdotes, and sharp flashes of wit, and even the driest and most metaphysical points of doctrine were often lit up and illuminated by these corruscations.

A panel taken out of the house of the Rev. John Lowell, of Newbury, is still preserved, representing the common style of an ecclesiastical meeting in those days.  The divines, each in full wig and gown, are seated around a table, smoking their pipes, and above is the well-known inscription:  In necessariis, Unitas:  in non necessariis, Libertas:  in utrisque Charitas.

In that delightfully naive and simple journal of the Rev. Thomas Smith, the first minister settled in Portland, Maine, in the year 1725, we find the following entries.

“July 4, 1763.  Mr. Brooks was ordained.  A multitude of people from my parish.  A decent solemnity.”

“January 16, 1765.  Mr. Foxcroft was ordained at New Gloucester.  We had a pleasant journey home.  Mr. L. was alert and kept us all merry.  A jolly ordination.  We lost sight of decorum.”

This Mr. L., by the by, who was so alert on this occasion, it appears by a note, was Stephen Longfellow, the great-grandfather of the poet.  Those who enjoy the poet’s acquaintance will probably testify that the property of social alertness has not evaporated from the family in the lapse of so many years.

It is recorded of Dr. Griffin, that, when President of the Andover Theological Seminary, he convened the students at his room one evening, and told them he had observed that they were all growing thin and dyspeptical from a neglect of the exercise of Christian laughter, and he insisted upon it that they should go through a company-drill in it then and there.  The Doctor was an immense man,—­over six feet in height, with great amplitude of chest and most magisterial manners.  “Here,” said he to the first, “you must practise; now hear me!” and bursting out into a sonorous laugh, he fairly obliged his pupils, one by one, to join, till the whole were almost convulsed.  “That will do for once,” said the Doctor, “and now mind you keep in practice!”

New England used to be full of traditions of the odd sayings of Dr. Bellamy, one of the most powerful theologians and preachers of his time.  His humor, however, seems to have been wholly a social quality, requiring to be struck out by the collision of conversation; for nothing of the peculiar quaintness and wit ascribed to him appears in his writings, which are in singularly simple, clear English.  One or two of his sayings circulated about us in our childhood.  For example, when one had built a fire of green wood, he exclaimed, “Warm me here! I’d as soon try to warm me by star-light on the north side of a tombstone!” Speaking of the chapel-bell of Yale College, he said, “It was about as good a bell as a fur cap with a sheep’s tail in it.”