After a man's long work is over and the sound of his voice is still, those in whose regard he has held a high place find his image strangely simplified and summarized. The hand of death in passing over it, has smoothed the folds, made it more typical and general. The figure retained by memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. HENRY JAMES. LETTERS OF CHARLES ELIOT NORTON CHAPTER I HINGHAM AND CAMBRIDGE (1678-1846) THE inheritance of Charles Eliot Norton from his New England ancestors is singularly clear. Descended on his father's side from a race of preachers, - the recognized aristocracy of early Massachusetts, the leaders of their communities, -on his mother's side from the vigorous stock of the Eliots, he was born to a blended heritage of ideal and practical qualities. The special strain, the defined character of his inheritance was to shape his course from the beginning, and set its seal, stamped even through a marked individuality, upon his whole career. Between 1633 and 1639, an old town record tells us, two hundred and six settlers had come out of Norfolk - that "hotbed of independency" - to Hingham in Massachusetts, named for the older Hingham; and tradition adds that "a band of these settlers led by the father and first minister of the town, the valiant Peter Hobart, gathered round their pastor under an old oak, to join with him in asking the blessing of the Lord on their new planting in the wilderness. Within a few months they had a house built for public worship." The good Peter Hobart's ministry was long, and it was not till the 27th of November, 1678, that "he did with his aged hand ordain a successor." It was John Norton - the ancestor of Charles Eliot Norton-whom Peter Hobart ordained. From the life which this ancestor embodied, his descendant derived so much that a passage from an address delivered by Charles Eliot Norton in 1881, at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Old MeetingHouse at Hingham, must take its place here, as it reveals the seventeenth and nineteenth century Nortons in their natural relation. "That successor [to Peter Hobart] was Mr. John Norton, a young man twenty-seven years old, who had received as good a training as New England could then bestow. He had been bred under the shadow of the church. Named for his more noted uncle, one of the four famous Johns1 who were the lights of the early Church of Boston, he had derived from him a taste for learning, and the consecration to the ministry. He graduated at Harvard College in 1671, in the last class sent forth by the pious and learned President Chauncy; and Sewall, afterward Chief Justice, was one of his classmates. It was a distinction then to graduate at 1 Cotton Mather's four "Johannes in Eremo": John Cotton, John Norton, John Wilson, and John Davenport. 2 "From an entry in Sewall's Diary, published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, a book from which more is to be learned than from any other of the life of Boston and its neighborhood during the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth, — it would appear that Mr. Norton had grave doubts as to coming into the Church. 'Satterday, Mar. 3, 1676/7 went to Mr. Norton to discourse with |