Fifteen years later, a great improvement began to be visible in this hitherto neglected suburb. The whole southerly slope of the hill had been purchased in 1735 by a citizen of renown, and soon a fair stone mansion began to show its elegant proportions on the most eligible spot near its centre. By this time, as we have it, on the authority of no less reputable a chronicler than Mr. John Oldmixon, "the Conversation of the Town of Boston is as polite as in most of the Cities and Towns of England; many of their merchants having traded into Europe, and those that stayed at home having the Advantage of Society with travellers" (including, of course, Mr. Oldmixon himself). "So that a gentleman from London would almost think himself at home at Boston," (this is in Mr. Anthony Trollope's own vein,) "when he observes the numbers of people, their houses, their furniture, their tables, their dress and conversation, which perhaps is as splendid and showy as that of the most considerable tradesman in London." _Primus inter pares_, however, stood the builder of the house on Beacon Hill, and there seems to be little doubt that Mr. Hancock's doings on his fine estate created a great stir of admiration, and that the new stone house was thought to be a very grand and famous affair in the infant metropolis of New England, in the year 1737. The precise period which brought Mr. Hancock to undertake the building of the house in Beacon Street was one in which it might not have been altogether uninteresting to have lived. The affairs of the mother country had been carried on for nearly twenty years of comparative peace, under the dexterous guidance of Sir Robert Walpole,--that cleverest, if not most scrupulous, minister of the British crown,--while my Lord Bolingbroke--permitted to return from France, but living under a qualified attainder, and closely watched by the keen-sighted minister--was occupying himself in writing his bitter and uncompromising pamphlets against the government of the House of Hanover. The minister's son Horace, an elegant, indolent youth, fresh from Cambridge, was travelling on the Continent in company with a shy and sensitive man of letters, not much known at the time,--by the name of Gray. This gentleman gained no small credit, however, some ten or twelve years afterwards, by the publication of "An Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,"--a piece which, notwithstanding the remote date of its appearance, it is possible that some of our readers may have chanced to come across in the course of their literary researches. Giddiness, loss of memory, and other alarming symptoms of mental disorder had begun to attack the great intellect of Dr. Swift, and forced him to lay aside the pen which for nearly half a century had been alternately the scourge and the support of the perplexed cabinets of the time. His friend Mr. Pope, however, was living quite snug and comfortable, on the profits of his