Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in
any other way than as matter for a smile. Possibly, also, could the
two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of
difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general
resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so
unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must
inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his
descendant. The Judge's volume of muscle could hardly be the same as
the Colonel's; there was undoubtedly less beef in him. Though looked
upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal
substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental
development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that
the modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his
ancestor, would have required at least an old-fashioned fifty-six to
keep the scale in equilibrio. Then the Judge's face had lost the ruddy
English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the
Colonel's weather-beaten cheek, and had taken a sallow shade, the
established complexion of his countrymen. If we mistake not, moreover,
a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even
in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under
discussion. As one of its effects, it bestowed on his countenance a
quicker mobility than the old Englishman's had possessed, and keener
vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdier something, on which these
acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids. This process,
for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress,
which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity
for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by
refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pyncheon
could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most
other men.
The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his
ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of
mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel
Pyncheon's funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his
deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof
of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him
seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual
world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor
does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the
consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the
Judge Pyncheon of to-day, neither clergyman, nor legal critic, nor
inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics,
would venture a word against this eminent person's sincerity as a
Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or
courage and faithfulness as the often-tried representative of his
political party. But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of
the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that
writes, for the public eye and for distant time,--and which inevitably
lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so
doing,--there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal
gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony. It is
often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic, view
of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast
discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the
pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original's back.