Imagine Boston in 1722, when this remarkable apprentice began to laugh, and to make others laugh, at the oppressive solemnities around him and above him. Then, as now, it was a population industrious and moral, extremely addicted to routine, habitually frugal, but capable of magnificent generosity, bold in business enterprises, valiant in battle, but in all the high matters averse to innovation. Then, as now, the clergy, a few important families, and Harvard College composed the ruling influence, against which it was martyrdom to contend. But then, as now, there were a few audacious spirits who rebelled against these united powers, and carried their opposition very far, sometimes to a wild excess, and thus kept this noblest of towns from sinking into an inane respectability. The good, frugal, steady-going, tax-paying citizen, who lays in his coal in June and buys a whole pig in December, would subdue the world to a vast monotonous prosperity, crushing, intolerable, if there were no one to keep him and the public in mind that, admirable as he is, he does not exhaust the possibilities of human nature. When we examine the portraits of the noted men of New England of the first century and a half after the settlement, we observe in them all a certain expression of _acquiescence_. There is no audacity in them. They look like men who could come home from fighting the French in Canada, or from chasing the whale among the icebergs of Labrador, to be scared by the menaces of a pontiff like Cotton Mather. They look like men who would take it seriously, and not laugh at all, when Cotton Mather denounced the Franklins, for poking fun at him in their newspaper, as guilty of wickedness without a parallel. "Some good men," said he, "are afraid it may provoke Heaven to deal with this place as never any place has yet been dealt withal."