An immense number of copies of the Boston Port Bill were sent with great rapidity all over the colonies. In the fine phrase which we must needs believe to be Burke's, these had the effect which the poets ascribe to the Fury's torch; they set the countries through which they passed in a flame. At Boston and New York "the populace had copies of the Bill printed upon mourning paper with a black border, which they cried about the streets under the title of a barbarous, cruel, bloody, and inhuman murder." In other places the Bill was publicly burned. All over the Continent great meetings were held, at which, with more or less vehemence of speech, but with a common enthusiasm and a common indignation, the Bill was denounced, and the determination to resist it defiantly asserted. When General Gage arrived on his mission of administration he found not merely the colony of Massachusetts, but the whole continent in an uproar. He had to deal with a vast majority of the people who were in proclaimed resistance to the Act, and who only differed in the extreme of resistance to which they were prepared immediately to go, and a minority who either approved or did not altogether disapprove of the Act. Gage was condemned to the government not of a cowed, humbled, and friendless province, but of a raging nation, frantic at the infringement of its rights, and sustained in the struggle it was resolved to make by the cheer and aid of a league of sister nations. The flame from the Fury's torch had spread with a vengeance. Gage was a brave man, an able man, an {166} honorable man; but for Alexander he was a little over-parted. The difficulties he had to encounter were too great for him to grapple with; the work he was meant to do too vast for his hands or the hands of any man. He was sent out to sway a chastened and degraded province; he found himself opposed by a defiant people, exalted by injustice and animated by attack. {167} CHAPTER LIII. THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD." [Sidenote: 1774--Death of Oliver Goldsmith]