prorogued to the second Wednesday in March.  “I guess,” Hutchinson writes, “that the Court is prorogued to a particular day with an intention that something from the King or the Parliament shall be then laid before them.”  “Some of the distant members will be on their journey before the Proclamation reaches them; and if the packet had not had a better passage than common, my orders would have found the Court sitting.”  As a consequence of this unlooked-for prorogation, the main guard continued to be stationed near the Town-House, until a portion of it played its tragic part on the memorable fifth of March.

The Lieutenant-Governor was apprehensive that this sudden prorogation would cause a great clamor; but he judged that the popular leaders were rather humbled and mortified than roused and enraged by it; and he soon expressed the conviction that this was the right step.  But the favorite organ of the Patriots, the “Boston Gazette,” in its next issue, of January the eighth, indicates anything but humility.  Through it James Otis, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams spoke kindling words to a community who received words from them as things.  Otis, in a card elicited by strictures on the “unmanly assault, battery, and barbarous wounding” of himself by Robinson, declared that “a clear stage and no favor were all he ever wished or wanted in court, country, camp, or city”; Hancock, in a card commenting on the report that he had violated the merchants’ agreement, “publicly defied all mankind” to prove the allegation, and pledged his cooeperation “in every legal and laudable measure to redress the grievances under which the Province and the Continent had so long labored”; and Samuel Adams, under the signature of “Vindex,” tested the legality of the prorogation by the terms of the Charter, and adjured every man to make it the subject of his contemplation.  “We all remember,” are his weighty words, “that, no longer ago than last year, the extraordinary dissolution by Governor Bernard, in which he declared he was purely Ministerial, produced another assembly, which, though legal in all its proceedings, awaked an attention in the very soul of the British empire.”  He claimed that a Massachusetts executive ought to act from the dictates of his own judgment.  “It is not to be expected that in ordinary times, much less at such an important period as this, any man, though endowed with the wisdom of Solomon, at the distance of three thousand miles, can be an adequate judge of the expediency of proroguing, and in effect of putting an end to, an American legislative assembly.”

The Lieutenant-Governor had now to meet the severest pressure brought to bear on him by the Tory faction for the employment of the troops, occasioned by a violation on the part of his sons of their agreement as to a sale of goods.  They had stipulated with the merchants that an importation of teas made by them should remain unsold, and, as security, had given to the committee of inspection the key of the building