Thus lived, for some quarter of a century more, this cheery and prosperous gentleman, growing into a manly opulence, and enjoying to the full the pleasant "seate of self-fruition" which he had so carefully set up for himself on Beacon Hill. Not much addressing himself, indeed, to "looking abroad into universality," as Bacon calls it, but rather honestly and heartily "doing his duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call him." He filled various posts of honor and dignity meanwhile,--always prominent, and even conspicuous, in the public eye,--and was "one of His Majesty's Council" at the commencement of the troubles which led to the War of the Revolution. The full development of this mighty drama, however, Thomas Hancock did not live to see. He died of an apoplexy, on the first day of August, 1764, about three of the clock in the afternoon, having been seized about noon of the same day, just as he was entering the Council Chamber. He was then in the sixty-second year of his age. By his will he gave one thousand pounds sterling for the founding of a professorship of the Oriental languages in Harvard College, one thousand pounds lawful money to the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians, six hundred pounds to the town of Boston, towards an Insane Hospital, and two hundred pounds to the Society for carrying on the Linen Manufactory,--an enterprise from which much appears, just then, to have been expected. His property was valued, after his decease, at about eighty thousand pounds sterling,--a very much larger sum for that time than its precise money equivalent would represent at the present day. Having no issue of his own, he left the bulk of his estate to his nephew John,--a gentleman who, without a tithe of the nerve and pith and vigor of this our Thomas, has yet happened, from the circumstances of the time in which he bore up the family-fortunes, to have acquired a much more distinguished name and filled a much larger space in the tablets of History than has ever fallen to the share of his stout old uncle.
The Hancock estate, as we have been accustomed to see it of late years, is greatly reduced from its original dimensions, and shorn of much of its ancient glory.[10] The property, in Mr. Thomas Hancock's time, extended on the east to the bend in Mount Vernon Street, including, of course, the whole of the grounds now occupied by the State House,[11]--on the west to Joy Street, called Hancock Street on the ancient plan of the estate now before us,--and in the rear about to what is now Derne Street, on the north side of Beacon Hill, and comprising on that side all the land through which Mount Vernon Street now runs, for the whole distance from Joy Street to Beacon-Hill Place. Thus was included a large part, too, of the site of the present reservoir on Derne Street, a portion of which, being the last of the estate sold up to the present year, was purchased by the city from the late John Hancock, Esq., some ten or twelve years ago. The two large wings of the house--the one on the east side containing an elegant ball-room, and that on the west side comprising the kitchen and other domestic offices--have long ago disappeared. The centre of the mansion, however, remains nearly intact, and with its antique furniture, stately old pictures, and the quaint, but comfortable appointments of the past century, still suffices to bring up to the mind of the visitor the most vivid and interesting reminiscences both of our Colonial and Revolutionary history.