The Scarlet Letter

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in

relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes

of rugged industry, which at all other times, seemed of the same

piece and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were

none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily

have found in the England of Elizabeth's time, or that of

James--no rude shows of a theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his

harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to

his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no

Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a

hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the

very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such professors

of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly

repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the

general sentiment which give law its vitality. Not the less,

however, the great, honest face of the people smiled--grimly,

perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the

colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country

fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was

thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the

courage and manliness that were essential in them. Wrestling

matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire,

were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner,

there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and--what attracted

most interest of all--on the platform of the pillory, already so

noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an

exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the

disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off

by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of

permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an

abuse of one of its consecrated places.

It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people

being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the

offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day),

that they would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping,

with their descendants, even at so long an interval as

ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the

early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so

darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent

years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn

again the forgotten art of gaiety.

The picture of human life in the market-place, though its

general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English

emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party

of Indians--in their savage finery of curiously embroidered

deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and

feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed

spear--stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity,

beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as

were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of

the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some

mariners--a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish

Main--who had come ashore to see the humours of Election Day.

They were rough-looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces,

and an immensity of beard; their wide short trousers were

confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough

plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some

instances, a sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of

palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and

merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They transgressed

without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were

binding on all others: smoking tobacco under the beadle's very

nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling;

and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae

from pocket flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping

crowd around them. It remarkably characterised the incomplete

morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a licence was

allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on

shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element.

The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate

in our own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this

very ship's crew, though no unfavourable specimens of the

nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it,

of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have

perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.