action.  “Your Bostonians,” a Southern letter runs, “shine with renewed lustre.  Their last efforts were indeed like themselves, full of wisdom, prudence, and magnanimity.  Such a conduct must silence every pretended suspicion, and baffle every vile attempt to calumniate their noble and generous struggles in the cause of American Liberty.”  “So much wisdom and virtue,” says a New-Hampshire letter, “as hath been conspicuous in the Bostonians, will not go unrewarded.  You will in all respects increase until you become the glory of New England, the pride of British kings, the scourge of tyrants, and the joy of the whole earth,” “The patriotism of Boston,” says another letter, “will be revered through every age.”  One of these tributes, from a Southern journal, in the Boston papers of December 18, 1769, runs,—­“The noble conduct of the Representatives, Selectmen, and principal merchants of Boston, in defending and supporting the rights of America and the British Constitution, cannot fail to excite love and gratitude in the heart of every worthy person in the British empire.  They discover a dignity of soul worthy the human mind, which is the true glory of man, and merits the applause of all rational beings.  Their names will shine unsullied in the bright records of Panic to the latest ages, and unborn millions will rise up and call them blessed.”

This eulogy on Boston is a great fact of these times, and therefore ought to have a place in a history of them.  It was not of a local cast, for it appears in several Colonies and in England; it was not a manufacture of politicians, for it is seen in the private letters of the friends of constitutional liberty which have come to light subsequently to the events; it was not a transient enthusiasm, for the same strain was continued during the years preceding the war.  The praise was bestowed on a town small in territory and comparatively small in population.  Such were the cities of Greece in the era of their renown.  “The territories of Athens, Sparta, and their allies,” remarks Gibbon, “do not exceed a moderate province of France or England; but after the trophies of Salamis or Plataea, they expand in our fancy to the gigantic size of Asia, which had been trampled under the feet of the victorious Greeks.”  No trophies had been gathered in an American Plataea; there had been no great civic triumph; there was no hero upon whom public affection centred; nor was there here a field on which to weave a web of court-intrigue, or to play a game of criminal ambition;—­there was, indeed, little that common constructors of history would consider to be history.  Yet it was now written, and made common thought by an unfettered press,—­“Nobler days nor deeds were never seen than at this time."[2] This was an instinctive appreciation of a great truth; for the real American Revolution was going on in the tidal flow of thought and feeling, and in the formation of public opinion.  A people inspired by visions of better days for humanity,