robe of state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on.  There was some shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony commenced.  The dim reflection of a remembered splendour, a colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld in proud old London—­we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord Mayor’s show—­might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of magistrates.  The fathers and founders of the commonwealth—­the statesman, the priest, and the soldier—­seemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence.  All came forth to move in procession before the people’s eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of rugged industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same piece and material with their religion.  Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth’s time, or that of James—­no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy.  All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which give law its vitality.  Not the less, however, the great, honest face of the people smiled—­grimly, perhaps, but widely too.  Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were essential in them.  Wrestling matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and—­what attracted most interest of all—­on the platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword.  But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places.