The New York herald., 1874-12-25
Tho New England Dinner.

1t is great pity that the Plymouth Pill
grims did not land at different season of the
year, for the genial gentle influence of the
natal day of Christianity. with its pleasant
convivial. commemorative ceremonial, its
flowers and its holly leaves, is sorely interfered
with by the grim Puritan anniversary five
days before. The original Puritans shud-
dered at the very name of Christmas. The
Goth OF December is much too near the 25th
Not that the contemporaneous mode of cele-
brating Forefathers' Day (exactly as if nobody
else had forefathers!) is in any sense GRIM
Very far from it. The Puritan Of to-day does
not even go to church or. to speak more prop
erly, to meeting" or as Mr. Beecher says in
his letters to Miss Proctor, "to Sermon" on
his anniversary; but he, or those who can af-
ford it, after morning. lucratively
spent dine ostentatously at Delmoni-
cos and there make and listen to
speeches of boastfulness and self-exaltaton.
So, year after year, it goes on, and the New
Englander who makes or listens to these
speeches. convinces himself or is convinced
by them that the early Purtans were not
only the .'salt of the earth,' for that is
homely, lowly illustration, but the chosen OF
God, especially in this our Western land,
alongside of whom the Cavalier and the
Huguenot and the Quaker and the Dutch
Protestant and the -Irishman from
Ulster, or the Catholic from the South, all
tugitives at one time or another from persecu-
ton quite as fierce as ever visited Elder
Brewster and his crew, are nobodies and OF no
account and the Puritan descendants are as
great and good as their progentors. We say
they who make or listen to such rhetorical
balderdash can by no possibility, in the course
of five days. sink down to the apprecia-
tion OF such humble, modest joys as those of
Christmas. With them the landing of the
Pilgrims is greater event than the birth of
the Saviour of mankind. The worst of it is,
too that there is what in music is known as
a crescendo. Fifty, nay, twenty years ago, the
New England dinner and speeches, here, at
least, in New York, were naught to what they
are now. We had one the other day which,
in homely phrase, beat, in ambitious self
complacent rhetoric, all it's predecessors out
of sight. 1t would be indecorous and utterly
inconsistent with the general object we have
in view to crticise in detail post -prandial
speeches of such accredited orators of New
England boastfulness, clerical and lay, as
Bcecher and Chaplin and our Conkling and
the president Of the Society of Plymouth"
1t was neck and neck, the Brooklyn nag, with
more bottom and steady from recent training,
coming in ahead. To our taste-but we are
not competent judges Oh the eartcle-President
Bailey,s was the best speech OF the evening.
1t was playful. 1t was genial, and, oddly
enough, it said not word about the Pilgrims
and did not mention the May yfower. But, rs
we say, Mr.. Beecher .outdid himself, while
Senator Conkling, according to one of his adj
mirers, was merely ornate and eloquent. But,
as we have said we eschew detail, and, ac-
cepting these speeches as the appropriate
gloss OF the sentiment within, again we ask and
they afford no adequate answer, by what right
do men of New England blood-and especially
this topical blood-arrogate to themselves
such pre-eminence? We concede what
they call their sturdy elements of charac-
ter. With advcrsaries like the. Indians,
brave, austere rigorous, revengeful, in
to nectual and severely but not gently