"Coming events cast their shadows before,"--
since we find that there lay in his nursery, in the family of Town Councillor Watt, the Bailie of Greenock, in the spring of the year 1736, a quiet, delicate, little Scotch baby, complacently sucking the tiny fist destined in after years to grasp and imprison that fearful vapory demon whose struggle for escape from his life-long captivity now furnishes the motive-power for the most mighty undertakings of man throughout the civilized world. It would surely have been something, we think,--the opportunity to have seen all these, from Bolingbroke in his library to James Watt in his cradle.
Turning to affairs somewhat nearer home, perhaps a slight glance at "y'e conversation and way of living" of the good people of Boston, during the years that Mr. Hancock was carrying on his building and getting himself gradually settled in its comforts, may help us to conceive a better idea of the form and pressure of the age. Well,--Mr. Peter Faneuil was just then laboring to persuade the town that it might not be the worst thing they could do to accept the gift of a handsome new Town-Hall which he was very desirous to build for them,--an opinion so furiously combated and opposed by the conservatives and practical men of that day, that Mr. Faneuil succeeded in carrying his revolutionary measure, at last, in the open town-meeting, by a majority of only seven votes (a much larger majority, however, it is but fair to observe, than that which adopted a decent City-Hall for the same municipality only last year). Whitefield was preaching on the Common, in front of Mr. Hancock's premises, to audiences of twenty thousand people, "as some compute," "poor deluded souls," says the unemotional Dr. Douglass, writing at the period, "whose time is their only Estate; called off to these exhortations, to the private detriment of their families, and great Damage to the Public: _thus perhaps every such exhortation of his was about £1000 damage to Boston_." Governor Belcher, who came home from England with the same instructions as Governor which he was sent out to oppose as envoy, had been superseded in his high office by "William Shirley, Esquire,--esteemed for his gentlemanly deportment." Watchmen were required "_in a moderate tone_ to cry the time o' night, and give an Account of the Weather as they walk't their rounds after twelve o'clock." The men that had been raised in town for the ill-starred expedition to Carthagena were being drilled on the Common,--and Hancock, writing to a friend, tells him, "We have the pleasure of Seeing 'em Disciplin'd every Day from 5 in morning to 8, & from 5 afternoon 'till night, before our house,--many Gentle'n & others Daily fill y'e Common,--& wee have not y'e Less Company for it, but a quicker draft for Wine & Cider." Annually, on the Fifth of November, Guy Fawkes, the Pope, the Devil, and the Pretender were burned on the Common, amidst much noise and rioting, often degenerating into the tapping of claret and solid cracking of crowns between the North End and South End champions,--who made this always their field-day, _par excellence_,--to the great worriment of the Town Constables, and the infinite wrath and disgust of the Select Men. And, finally, we remark, "the goodness of the pavement in Boston might compare with most in London, for to gallop a Horse on it is three Shillings and fourpence Forfeit!"