to add that of course this is largely tempered by other tendencies and features; it would be especially unpardonable of me to forget the eminently intellectual, artistic, and refined aspects of New York life of which I was privileged to enjoy glimpses.  In Boston, however, there is something different.  Mere wealth, even in these degenerate days, does not seem to play so important a part in her society.  The names one constantly hears or sees in New York are names like Astor, Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Bradley-Martin, names which, whatever other qualities they connote, stand first and foremost for mere crude wealth.  In Boston the prominent public names—­the names that naturally occur to my mind as I think of Boston as I saw it—­are Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poet and novelist; Eliot, the college president; Francis Walker, the political economist; Higginson, the generous cultivator of classical music; Robert Treat Paine, the philanthropist; Edward Everett Hale; and others of a more or less similar class.  Again, in New York and in Chicago (Pullman, Marshall Field, Armour) the prominent names are emphatically men of to-day and seem to change with each generation.  In Boston we have the names of the first governor and other leaders of the early settlers still shining in their descendants with almost undiminished lustre.  The present mayor of Boston, for example, is a member of a family the name of which has been illustrious in the city’s annals for two hundred years.  He is the fifth of his name in the direct line to gain fame in the public service, and the third to occupy the mayor’s chair.  No less than sixteen immediate members of the family are recorded in the standard biographical dictionaries of America.

While doubtless the Attic tales of Boeotian dulness were at least as often well invented as true, it is perhaps the case that there is generally some ground for the popular caricatures of any given community.  I duly discounted the humorous and would-be humorous stories of Boston’s pedantry that I heard in New York, and found that as a rule I had done right so to do.  Blue spectacles are not more prominent in Boston than elsewhere; its theatres do not make a specialty of Greek plays; the little boys do not petition the Legislature for an increase in the hours of school.  There yet remains, however, a basis of truth quite large enough to show the observer how the reputation was acquired.  It is a solemn fact that what would appear in England as “No spitting allowed in this car” is translated in the electric cars of Boston into:  “The Board of Health hereby adjudges that the deposit of sputum in street-cars is a public nuisance."[28] The framer of this announcement would undoubtedly speak of the limbs of a piano and allude to a spade as an agricultural implement.  And in social intercourse I have often noticed needless celerity in skating over ice that seemed to my ruder British sense quite well able to bear any ordinary weight, as well as a certain subtlety of allusiveness that appeared to exalt ingenuity of phrase at the expense of common sense and common candour.  Too high praise cannot easily be given to the Boston Symphony Concerts; but it is difficult to avoid a suspicion of affectation in the severe criticism one hears of the conductor whenever he allows a little music of a lighter class than usual to appear on the programme.