Governor Winthrop's Return to Boston: An Interview with a Great Character

Josiah Quincy the elder, the second on the roll of Boston's distinguished Mayors, declared that the City might well adopt Winthrop as its patron saint. His was an ideal, saintly life, and his character, in a sense, supernatural. He bore success and defeat in a political election with like equanimity, a trait that, as it were, by a law of heredity marks with special honor his living representative. Whether in office or out, and possessing large estates or, one after another, deprived of them, he kept his mind active and his brain industriously working for the development of a higher social life under Christian culture in a virgin land, by his leadership, under the Providence he devoutly acknowledged, to be fitted and fashioned for a new and powerful country, of which Boston was to be a memorable city.

Nor could he fail to remark upon the location of the statue set up in his honor in Scollay Square, rather than on Boston Common, which he had laid out and secured to posterity. The City Square in Charlestown, where he first unrolled the old charter of the Colony before the new government at its first meeting here, would have been a better site for it than the one selected.

Difficult it is, indeed, to set down in worthy lines the remembrance of the interview herein depicted. Of course, it has been faintly and inadequately done. Let us hope, however, that, should Winthrop's spirit, two or three centuries hence, visit again the last and most eventful scenes of his earthly life, he will find Boston, though changed anew, yet vastly improved, keeping pace with all developments for the good of an ever advancing race, and second to none in the Commonwealth or Nation in true excellence and progress.