The Scarlet Letter

Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and

consider what was practicable to be done in this new and

startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was

heard approaching along a contiguous street. It denoted the

advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens on its way

towards the meeting-house: where, in compliance with a custom

thus early established, and ever since observed, the Reverend

Mr. Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election Sermon.

Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and

stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the

market-place. First came the music. It comprised a variety of

instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and

played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object

for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to

the multitude--that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to

the scene of life that passes before the eye. Little Pearl at

first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the

restless agitation that had kept her in a continual

effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and

seemed to be borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the long

heaves and swells of sound. But she was brought back to her

former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and

bright armour of the military company, which followed after the

music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession. This

body of soldiery--which still sustains a corporate existence,

and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honourable

fame--was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were

filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse,

and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in

an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the

science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the

practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the

military character might be seen in the lofty port of each

individual member of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their

services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European

warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp

of soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished

steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a

brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to

equal.

And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind

the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's

eye. Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty

that made the warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not

absurd. It was an age when what we call talent had far less

consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce

stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people

possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which,

in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller

proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection

and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill,

and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English

settler on these rude shores--having left king, nobles, and all

degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and

necessity of reverence was strong in him--bestowed it on the

white hair and venerable brow of age--on long-tried

integrity--on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience--on

endowments of that grave and weighty order which gave the idea

of permanence, and comes under the general definition of

respectability. These primitive statesmen,

therefore--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their

compeers--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the

people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished

by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They

had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or

peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of

cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of character here

indicated were well represented in the square cast of

countenance and large physical development of the new colonial

magistrates. So far as a demeanour of natural authority was

concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see

these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House

of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.