Dr. Bullivant

His person was not eminent enough, either by nature or circumstance, to
deserve a public memorial simply for his own sake, after the lapse of a
century and a half from the era in which he flourished. His character,
in the view which we propose to take of it, may give a species of
distinctness and point to some remarks on the tone and composition of
New England society, modified as it became by new ingredients from the
eastern world, and by the attrition of sixty or seventy years over the
rugged peculiarities of the original settlers. We are perhaps
accustomed to employ too sombre a pencil in picturing the earlier times
among the Puritans, because at our cold distance, we form our ideas
almost wholly from their severest features. It is like gazing on some
scenes in the land which we inherit from them; we see the mountains,
rising sternly and with frozen summits tip to heaven, and the forests,
waving in massy depths where sunshine seems a profanation, and we see
the gray mist, like the duskiness of years, shedding a chill obscurity
over the whole; but the green and pleasant spots in the hollow of the
hills, the warm places in the heart of what looks desolate, are hidden
from our eyes. Still, however, a prevailing characteristic of the age
was gloom, or something which cannot be more accurately expressed than
by that term, and its long shadow, falling over all the intervening
years, is visible, though not too distinctly, upon ourselves. Without
material detriment to a deep and solid happiness, the frolic of the mind
was so habitually chastened, that persons have gained a nook in history
by the mere possession of animal spirits, too exuberant to be confined
within the established bounds. Every vain jest and unprofitable word
was deemed an item in the account of criminality, and whatever wit, or
semblance thereof, came into existence, its birthplace was generally the
pulpit, and its parent some sour old Genevan divine. The specimens of
humor and satire, preserved in the sermons and controversial tracts of
those days, are occasionally the apt expressions of pungent thoughts;
but oftener they are cruel torturings and twistings of trite ideas,
disgusting by the wearisome ingenuity which constitutes their only
merit. Among a people where so few possessed, or were allowed to
exercise, the art of extracting the mirth which lies hidden like latent
caloric in almost everything, a gay apothecary, such as Dr. Bullivant,
must have been a phenomenon.

We will suppose ourselves standing in Cornhill, on a pleasant morning of
the year 1670, about the hour when the shutters are unclosed, and the
dust swept from the doorsteps, and when Business rubs its eyes, and
begins to plod sleepily through the town. The street, instead of