lower court, but appealed on technicalities. Both sides pleaded their own cases, and shocking as it may be to the moral sensibilities, Gibson won! Discouraged by such an untoward result, the College seems to have given up the struggle; and the crafty Samuel, for aught known to the contrary, continued his nefarious practices until effectually restrained by the final decree of Death. From his story we gather a strange conception of the college discipline of those days—and a very poor opinion of the professional logicians and rhetoricians when confronted, in a practical argument, by the mother-wit of a simple yeoman.[1]
Many other characters must have been familiar to the College in those uncouth and primitive times, but we have little record of them; doubtless because, unless forced to the front by public proceedings like the above, they made no particular impression on a society where, as already hinted, everyone was more or less “pecool’ar.” For a long time Harvard seems to have suffered from sharp practitioners of the same stamp as Gibson, and from the same inexplicable laxness governing their relations with the students, especially their use of the students’ rooms. Certainly up to the Revolution the college laws contained a standing fine of 1s. 6d.
- ↑ See Paige, History of Cambridge, 225n., 558; Colonial Soc. Transactions, iii, 455, 467, viii, 27; original documents in files of Supreme Judicial Court, Boston.
