For instance, the Old Cambridge in which the Vassalls
live is not the Old Cambridge of fact, but the Vassalls are the
Vassalls of fact, though the ancestral halls in which they dwell
are of a baroniality difficult of verification. Their honor,
their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though their
social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionary
experience. The social Boston of the novel is more like; its
difference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finely
suggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in
which it is not the greater Boston. Petrina Faneuil, the
heroine, is derivatively of the older Boston which has passed
away, and actually of the newer Boston which will not be so much
regretted when it passes, the fast Boston, the almost rowdy
Boston, the decadent Boston. It is, of course, a Boston much
worse in the report than in the fact, but it is not unimaginably
bad to the student who notes that the lapse from any high ideals
is to a level lower than that of people who have never had them.
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