ffox," the Reverend Jabez Fox of Woburn, it may
be supposed, as it passed from his heirs to the first Jonathan Hastings;
from him to his son, the long remembered College Steward; from him in the
year 1792 to the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson, Professor of Hebrew and
other Oriental languages in Harvard College, whose large personality swam
into my ken when I was looking forward to my teens; from him the
progenitors of my unborn self.
I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet,
with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me.
His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me
that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have
pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the seat
of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed Christo
et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish to find one's self
in an empty saddle; Cotton Mather was miserable all his days, I am
afraid, after that entry in his Diary: "This Day Dr. Sewall was chosen
President, for his Piety."
There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger and
more formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their venerable
countenances than the race which succeeds them, to the same boys grown
older.
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