The reader may remember how my recollections started from their
hiding-place when I came, in one of our excursions, upon the name of
Lechmere, as belonging to the owner of a fine estate by or through which
we were driving. I had a similar twinge of reminiscence at meeting with
the name of Gorges, which is perpetuated by a stately monument at the
end of the north aisle of the cathedral. Sir Thomas Gorges, Knight of
Longford Castle, may or may not have been of the same family as the
well-remembered grandiose personage of the New England Pilgrim period.
The title this gentleman bore had a far more magnificent sound than
those of his contemporaries, Governor Carver and Elder Brewster. No
title ever borne among us has filled the mouth quite so full as that of
"Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Lord Palatine of the Province of Maine," a
province with "Gorgeana" (late the plantation of Agamenticus) as its
capital. Everywhere in England a New Englander is constantly meeting
with names of families and places which remind him that he comes of a
graft from an old tree on a new stock. I could not keep down the
associations called up by the name of Gorges. There is a certain
pleasure in now and then sprinkling our prosaic colonial history with
the holy water of a high-sounding title; not that a "Sir" before a man's
name makes him any better,--for are we not all equal, and more than
equal, to each other?--but it sounds pleasantly. Sir Harry Vane and Sir
Harry Frankland look prettily on the printed page, as the illuminated
capital at the head of a chapter in an old folio pleases the eye of the
reader. Sir Thomas Gorges was the builder of Longford Castle, now the
seat of the Earl of Radnor, whose family name is Bouverie. Whether our
Sir Ferdinando was of the Longford Castle stock or not I must leave to
my associates of the Massachusetts Historical Society to determine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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