Fielding or Smollet; while, in other columns, he would delight his
imagination with the enumerated items of all sorts of finery, and with
the rival advertisements of half a dozen peruke-makers. In short, newer
manners and customs had almost entirely superseded those of the Puritans,
even in their own city of refuge.

It was natural that, with the lapse of time and increase of wealth and
population, the peculiarities of the early settlers should have waxed
fainter and fainter through the generations of their descendants, who
also had been alloyed by a continual accession of emigrants from many
countries and of all characters. It tended to assimilate the colonial
manners to those of the mother-country, that the commercial intercourse
was great, and that the merchants often went thither in their own ships.
Indeed, almost every man of adequate fortune felt a yearning desire, and
even judged it a filial duty, at least once in his life, to visit the
home of his ancestors. They still called it their own home, as if New
England were to them, what many of the old Puritans had considered it,
not a permanent abiding-place, but merely a lodge in the wilderness,
until the trouble of the times should be passed. The example of the
royal governors must have had much influence on the manners of the
colonists; for these rulers assumed a degree of state and splendor which
had never been practised by their predecessors, who differed in nothing
from republican chief-magistrates, under the old charter. The officers
of the crown, the public characters in the interest of the
administration, and the gentlemen of wealth and good descent, generally
noted for their loyalty, would constitute a dignified circle, with the
governor in the centre, bearing a very passable resemblance to a court.
Their ideas, their habits, their bode of courtesy, and their dress would
have all the fresh glitter of fashions immediately derived from the
fountain-head, in England. To prevent their modes of life from becoming