Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and
consider what was practicable to be done in this new and
startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was
heard approaching along a contiguous street. It denoted the
advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens on its way
towards the meeting-house: where, in compliance with a custom
thus early established, and ever since observed, the Reverend
Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election Sermon.
Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and
stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the
market-place. First came the music. It comprised a variety of
instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and
played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object
for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to
the multitude--that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to
the scene of life that passes before the eye. Little Pearl at
first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the
restless agitation that had kept her in a continual
effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and
seemed to be borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the long
heaves and swells of sound. But she was brought back to her
former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and
bright armour of the military company, which followed after the
music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession. This
body of soldiery--which still sustains a corporate existence,
and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honourable
fame--was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were
filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse,
and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in
an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the
science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the
practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the
military character might be seen in the lofty port of each
individual member of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their
services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European
warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp
of soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished
steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a
brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to
equal.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind
the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's
eye. Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty
that made the warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not
absurd. It was an age when what we call talent had far less
consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce
stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people
possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which,
in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller
proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection
and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill,
and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English
settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and all
degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and
necessity of reverence was strong in him--bestowed it on the
white hair and venerable brow of age--on long-tried
integrity--on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience--on
endowments of that grave and weighty order which gave the idea
of permanence, and comes under the general definition of
respectability. These primitive statesmen,
therefore--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their
compeers--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the
people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished
by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They
had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or
peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of
cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of character here
indicated were well represented in the square cast of
countenance and large physical development of the new colonial
magistrates. So far as a demeanour of natural authority was
concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see
these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House
of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.