privileges of life. On the whole, their enjoyments and amusements were such as characterize a state of healthy-mindedness at a time of marked transition.
In the main, the condition of the people was deplorable for what they lacked in the way of incitements to pleasurable and helpful social and cultural employments rather than because of what they possessed.[1] When it is recalled how considerable was the dearth of material for mental occupation; how undeveloped, for example, were music and painting;[2] how the newspapers and magazines of the day supplied little or nothing of a constructive or inspiring character; how science was almost totally undeveloped,[3] libraries few in number and destitute of stimulating material, the colleges for the most part mooning the years away over insipid and useless abstractions and dogmatic formulations,
- ↑ Bentley, Diary, vol. i, pp. 253 et seq., discusses at length "the Puerile Sports usual in these parts of New England". Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, vol. ii, p. 696, comments on the dearth of public amusement. Cf. also ibid., p. 864. The changed attitude of the public toward dancing, as reported by Weeden, pp. 696 and 864, doubtless finds its explanation in the growing consciousness that the resources in the way of entertainment deserve to be increased. At the close of the century, however, dancing was still frowned upon. Bentley, Diary, vol. ii, pp. 17, 232, 233, 296, 322, 363.
- ↑ Brissot, New Travels in the United States of America, p. 72: "Music, which their teachers formerly prescribed as a diabolic art, begins to make part of their education. In some houses you hear the forte-piano. This art, it is true, is still in its infancy; but the young novices who exercise it, are so gentle, so complaisant, and so modest, that the proud perfection of art gives no pleasure equal to what they afford." Cf. also Bentley, Diary, vol. ii, pp. 247 et seq., 292.
- ↑ Brissot, New Travels in the United States of America, pp. 86 et seq. Brissot generously explains this fact upon the ground that in a country so new, whose immediate concerns were so compelling, and where, also, wealth is not centered in a few hands, the cultivation of the arts and sciences is not to be expected. On the side of invention the situation was far from being as bad as a reading of Brissot might seem to imply. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, vol. ii, pp. 847-858.
