George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[20] if its lights were not so bright, its shadows were less deep. The struggle alike for subsistence and superiority was less eager; and every capacity found employment in the rapid growth of a young country.

Boston has been compared to Athens, sometimes in good faith and sometimes as a sneer; but there is and was at least one marked point of resemblance between the two. In both cities the people were accustomed to hear public measures discussed by leading citizens, and were thus educated to a knowledge of their political duties. Athens and the Acropolis, Rome and the Capitol, are not more associated ideas than are Boston and Faneuil Hall. From a period earlier than the Revolutionary War, the people of Boston were accustomed to crowd that hall, and listen to men whom wisdom and eloquence raised to the rank of popular teachers and speakers; and at the time of Mr. Ticknor's birth there were two men in Boston—Harrison Gray Otis on the Federal side, and Charles Jarvis on the Democratic—who, in any age or country, would have been deemed excellent speakers.

Mr. Ticknor thus states his recollections of the town meetings of Boston in his youth:—

‘I now (1865) feel sure—though at the time I did not so look upon them—that the town meetings held in Boston during the war of 1812 were more like the popular meetings in Athens than anything of the kind the world has ever seen. Commerce and trade were dead; the whole population was idle, and all minds intent on the politics of the day, as affecting their individual existence and happiness. Faneuil Hall could be filled with an eager and intelligent crowd at any moment of day or night. Town meetings were often continued two or three days, morning and evening. Caucuses were constantly held on Sunday evenings, and often it was necessary to adjourn from the small hall, where they might have been collected, to the Old South Church, for greater space. The orators were eloquent, and sometimes adverse parties met to discuss questions together. Governor Eustis, Mr. George Blake, and others on one side; Mr. H. G. Otis, Mr. Samuel Dexter, Mr. William Sullivan, on the other. All the speeches were extemporaneous; it would have lowered a man's reputation materially if it had been supposed that he had prepared and committed a speech to memory. Such a thing was never ’