THE 
 
 "HOW I WAS EDUCATED 
 
 t c r 
 
 FROM TEE FORUM MAGAZINE 
 
 I- 
 
 ( 
 
 '0CT22 1887 ' 
 
 Of 
 
 NEW YOEK 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 
 1888 
 
^ 
 
 COPTEIGHT, 188T, 
 
 By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 
AUTHOKS. 
 
 Edwabd E. Hale ..... 
 
 Thomas Wentwobth Higginson 
 
 F. A. P. Babnabd, Peesident of Columbia Col- 
 lege ...... 
 
 John H. Vincent, Chancellob of Chautauqua 
 Untvebsity ..... 
 
 Pbofessob William T. Habbis 
 
 S. C Baetlett, Peesident of Dabtmouth College 
 
 J. K. Kendeick, fobmeely Peesident of Vassab 
 College ..... 
 
 Timothy Dwight, Peesident of Yale College . 
 
 E. Gr. Eobinson, Peesident of Beown Univeesity 
 
 James B. Angell, Peesident of Univebsity of 
 Michigan ..... 
 
 Andeew D. White, foemeely Peesident of Coe- 
 nell Uniyeesity .... 
 
 PAGE 
 
 First Paper, 9 
 Second " 18 
 
 Third 
 
 Fourth " 
 
 39 
 
 Fifth " 
 
 50 
 
 Sixth " 
 
 60 
 
 Seventh " 
 
 69 
 
 Eighth " 
 
 79 
 
 Ninth " 
 
 91 
 
 Tenth 
 
 Eleventh 
 
 29 
 
 102 
 
 112 
 
FIRST PAPEE. 
 By EDWARD E. HALE. 
 
 The editor of The Forum has thought that a series of papers, 
 in which different people shall describe the methods of their 
 school education, may be at least amusing, and perhaps profit- 
 able, if only by way of caution. He has, therefore, induced a 
 good many men to pose on his platform as " awful warnings," 
 and, as it happens in the story of the Indian march, he selects 
 a little elephant to lead the risky way down into the river. I 
 anticipate so much pleasure from reading the revelations of 
 those who come after me, that I have promised to be as frank 
 as Rousseau pretended to be, and much more than he was, in 
 telling my story. "Story — God bless you, I have none to 
 tell." 
 
 Really, I am selected as pioneer in this march because there 
 was nothing exceptional in my school or college course. It was 
 just like that of thousands of other men of the last fifty years. 
 I never was sent to Germany to study. I never played with an 
 abacus. I never sat at the feet of any Fellenberg. I did see 
 Mr. Alcott's amusing schools, but only as a base Philistine, who 
 went in to scoff and came away to report transcendental vagaries. 
 The everyday education of a boy born with good health, of good 
 parents, in New England, sixty odd years ago — this is what 
 the reader is to follow, and what came of it, unless he judiciously 
 skip to the next article, to read what Bishop Coxe says of cre- 
 mation 
 
 I had the great good luck to be born in the middle of a large 
 family. "What saith the "Vulgate ? "Da mihi nee primum esse 
 nee ultimum." Is that the text? My Yulgate is in too small 
 type to consult, and the passage will be hard to find, but when 
 found will be well worth noting. I lived with three brothers 
 and three sisters ; I was the fourth, counting each way ; and I 
 should advise anybody, who is consulted in such matters, to 
 
10 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 select that place in the family economy. And all well-meaning 
 parents would do well could they arrange to give that place to 
 each of the nine or thirteen children. A large family and a 
 good place in it : that is the thing to be very grateful for. 
 
 While you are planning, also, you might to advantage put in 
 absolutely sound health ; a good vigorous constitution. For a 
 boy or young man, particularly, put in a digestion which, as Dr. 
 Holmes says, does not shrink from hot gingerbread just before 
 dinner ; that is an excellent marching companion. I will there- 
 fore suggest that also for people who are asking the fairies for 
 good gifts to their children. 
 
 The fourth child will be apt to wish to go to school when 
 the three older children go. The mother will not object if the 
 school be unscientific, happy-go-lucky, and simply a place where 
 a good-natured girl of twenty keeps thirty children reasonably 
 happy for three hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. 
 To such a school, miscalled a dame school by writers now, I 
 went or was led, willingly enough, for four years. I remember 
 four realities there. One was the flickering of motes of dust in 
 the sunbeams, when the shutters were closed — curtains there were 
 none in those primeval days. My observations then have as- 
 sisted me in following out Mr. Tyndall's since. One was the 
 method of making sand-pies on the floor. One was the first 
 page of the New York Primer — and I wish I had the book now. 
 The fourth was sitting in a yellow chair in the middle of the 
 school-room, reading an interesting book. I was quite absorbed 
 in the book when Abel Fullum came for me. Abel Fullum 
 was the " hired man," who was then, in 1826, in my father's 
 employ, and who now, in 1886, kindly oversees my daily duties, 
 lest I should go far astray. He accompanied us to and from 
 school four times a day, the distance being too great for inex- 
 perienced feet. " Doctor," said Fullum to me, when we were 
 well in the street, " what-ure-been doin' that was naughty ? " I 
 said I had done nothing wrong. But Fullum assured me I had, 
 and that no one ever was placed in that yellow chair who had 
 not been naughty. This I then remembered to be true. But 
 it had not crossed my mind before. Nor do I now know, nor 
 have I ever known, from that time to this, why I was thus 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. H 
 
 punished. I did not then know, but by accident, that I was 
 punished. It is not the only time, I believe, when I have 
 wounded my friends without meaning to and without knowing 
 it, and have borne their wrath with equanimity from sheer 
 ignorance that they were displeased, for which I now apologize 
 to them. And I mention the anecdote by way of suggesting to 
 teachers that it is well for them to tell children why they punish 
 them, if, by good luck, they know themselves. 
 
 From this school I went at five to another school kept by 
 a man. I went because it seemed best that I should go 
 to a man's school, not because I had learned all that Miss 
 Susan Whitney knew. Sweet saint, she died, honored of all 
 men, not long since, and now is in a world where they do not 
 need to learn or teach the letters. By great good fortune, a 
 young man whom I will call Simple had come to town after 
 graduating at the college where a friend of my father was educated. 
 This friend had a son named Edward, who was a crony of mine 
 at the dame school. His father had Simple to take care of, 
 and Simple had opened a boys' school. To this school my friend 
 and I were sent, he a few days before me. I wondered, in my 
 boyhood, why my father, who was the most sensible man I ever 
 knew — indeed the only thoroughly sensible man I ever heard 
 of except Ben. Franklin and two other men who shall not 
 be named here now — why, I say, he sent me to Simple's 
 school. But I found out, long since. He had tried other schools 
 for my older brother. He knew the tomfoolery of the Lancas- 
 trian system then in vogue, and the kindred tomfoolery of the 
 martinet systems, much in vogue since. Having found Simple, 
 he found what he wanted — a good-natured, innocent fellow, who 
 would neither set the bay on fire nor want to, who could and 
 would keep us out of mischief for five or six hours a day, and 
 would never send us home mad with rage, or injustice, or ambi- 
 tion. A feather-pillow sort of man Simple was. I have been 
 sorry to know since that his last days were not comfortable. For 
 I owed him much, that he never nagged me, nor drove me, never 
 punished me but once, and then I was probably in the wrong, 
 though again I do not know, "no more nor the dead," as the 
 vernacular says, what I was punished for. Possibly I gained 
 
12 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 under his care a happy scorn and contempt for all the mechan- 
 ism of schools, which I have kept until this day. Sometimes he 
 would be "tardy " himself. I remember marshaling all the 
 boys in their seats, and having one class out to recite, so that 
 I might shame him when he came after dinner. But it made 
 little difference whether he were there or no. I owe him one 
 thing, that he or my older brother taught me " vulgar fractions " 
 well, so that I have ever since been fond of mathematics. 
 That same brother used to say, what I think is true, that when 
 any one says he is not " fond of mathematics," he means that he 
 was not properly taught vulgar fractions and the rule of three. 
 For the rest, I was put on my Latin paradigms when I was six 
 years old, and learned them reasonably well. We limped 
 through a Latin version of Eobinson Crusoe when I was eight 
 years old. But I knew nothing of the Latin language, as a lan- 
 guage, till I went to the Boston Latin School. 
 
 I cannot remember the time when I could not read as well as 
 I can now. This is saying very little, if I may judge from what 
 the teachers of Elocution tell me, who call on me every now and 
 then, asking permission to improve my cacology. But I now 
 read well enough to understand the simpler parts of the Bible, 
 and such passages of the newspapers as are meant to be intelli- 
 gible. And, to answer the question of Tan Forum, " what came " 
 of my education of the first seven or eight years, I should say 
 that this ability to read was "ue thing, a thorough fondness of 
 arithmetic was another, a decided indifference to school-rank, 
 as something of no great consequence, was another. I had, all 
 along, a very decided feeling that I comprehended the position 
 as well as the master did, and that it was as fitting that he should 
 consult me, as I him. But I do not think that this was any 
 peculiarity of mine. It belongs to what the orthodox call the 
 depravity of human nature, what Artemus Ward calls " abso- 
 lute cussedness," and what Dr. Channing calls man's conscious- 
 ness of the Divinity within him. 
 
 I was nine years old when I was transferred to a Public 
 School. And if anybody is reading this gossip for my advice, 
 it would be simply this : If you are an American, send your boy 
 to a Public School. When I sometimes meet an American who 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 13 
 
 does not seem to me to understand his own country, because be 
 does not understand bis own countrymen, I always suspect that 
 be never bad tbe great privilege of associating witb tbe other 
 boys of bis town and his time at a public school. Of course, this 
 advice is wholly different from tbe advice which the same words 
 would give in England. The Public School there is a school 
 of one social class, as most private schools are with us. 
 
 The school I was sent to was the Latin School of Boston, 
 the oldest school in America. It was tbe school of Ben. 
 Franklin, of both Adamses, of John Hancock, and in later times 
 of Everett, of Sumner, and Wendell Phillips. We are all proud 
 of it in Boston. In my day it was under the admirable care of 
 Mr. Dillaway, tbe same who is well known to teachers by his 
 good editions of Latin text-books. 
 
 I came home from this school at the end of the first month, 
 with a report which showed that I was ninth in a class of fifteen. 
 That is about the average rank which I generally had. I showed 
 it to my mother, because I had to. I thought she would not like 
 it. To my great surprise and relief, she said it was a very good 
 report. I said I thought she would be displeased because I was 
 so low in the class. " Oh," she said, "that is no matter. Prob- 
 ably the other boys are brighter than you. God made them so, 
 and you cannot help that. But the report says you are among 
 the boys who behave well. That you can see to, and that is 
 all I care about." The truth was, that at tbe end of tbe report 
 there was a sort of sub-report of "Bank as regards conduct 
 alone," as if conduct alone were not the most important affair in 
 earth or heaven. 
 
 It was spoken of as an insignificant and mean affair, some- 
 what as the orthodox pulpit used to speak of "mere morals," as 
 if mere morals were some low trade a man engaged in. The boys 
 never cared for this " conduct alone " report, nor the masters, as 
 far as I saw. But if my people did at home, that was enough 
 for me. And from that moment, till I left college, I was com- 
 fortably indifferent as to school-rank or college-rank, regarding 
 which, as has been said, I had formed my own opinion before. 
 
 I had four useful years at that schooL I was growing fast, 
 physically, and I remember two summers when I was taken out 
 
14 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 of school, and read the books at home. That is an excellent plan, 
 when a boy is growing fast. He soon finds out that he can do 
 twice as much in the same time at home as he ever does at 
 school. But it would be a very poor plan to have him at home 
 so much that he did not know " the other fellows." I remember 
 where I sat at school, and how the room seemed glorified to me, 
 when, after I had been studying Latin three years, a gentleman 
 named Streeter explained to me what was meant by certain verbs 
 " governing " the accusative and genitive. It had never occurred 
 to Simple that it was of any consequence that I should know 
 what this meant Francis Gardner taught me Greek from the 
 beginning. He was, in Boston, a distinguished man for nearly 
 fifty years. It is a privilege to have learned Greek with such 
 a man. I know it better than I know Latin now, and this is 
 partly because he taught me. But it is, I suppose, an easier 
 language. 
 
 In the years between 1832 and 1852 the real system of in- 
 struction by popular lectures was at its best in New England. 
 The present system of entertainment by lectures is wholly differ- 
 ent. As boys, we learned a great deal at evening lectures, and 
 spent our evenings in winter very profitably. I see no such 
 opportunities now, and I fancy that bright boys now learn from 
 books, what we learned from men. 
 
 I was at Harvard College from 1835 to 1839. The men 
 whose names are still well known among my teachers there, were 
 Sparks, both Wares, Palfrey, Channing, Longfellow, Pierce, 
 Felton, Lovering, Bowen, Mason, Dana, Bache, and, older than 
 any of the rest of them, dear old Francis Salet. Josiah Quincy 
 was President. A philologist did the Latin, and made us hate 
 it, and we should have hated him too, had we not thought 
 of the possibilities of human nature, and that, deep hid in him, 
 there must be something divine. Among them all, I detested 
 Greek and Latin, when we left them at the end of the junior year, 
 and I should never have read a word of either since, if I could 
 help it, but that I had to teach them. Then I regained the 
 natural love of them ; " of which," as my great Master says, " in 
 its place." 
 
 The Channing spoken of above, was Edward Tyrrel Chan- 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 15 
 
 ning, and I wish the exigencies of The Forum would permit me 
 to use fifty of its pages in expression of gratitude to this gentle- 
 man, and in such explanation as I could give of the skill by 
 which he interested us in the study of English, and trained us to 
 the use of this noblest language yet known. I am told that, now, 
 nobody will look over students' themes if he can help it, that it 
 is a sort of drudgery from which a man escapes to some duty 
 considered higher in grade. Ah me ! There are hundreds of 
 us still knocking about who are grateful to him that he did not 
 think so. And if the dear public thinks that Clarke, Holmes, 
 Dana, Story, Lowell, Higginson, Frothingham, Child, and Park- 
 man write good English, let them be grateful to dear "Ned 
 Channing," who taught them how. 
 
 The classical men made us hate Latin and Greek ; but the 
 mathematical men (such men ! Pierce and Lovering) made us love 
 mathematics, and we shall always be grateful to them. 
 
 We gained a great deal from Longfellow. He came to Cam- 
 bridge in our first year. He was not so much older than we as to 
 be distant, was always accessible, friendly, and sympathetic. All 
 poor teachers let " the book " come between them and the pupil. 
 Great teachers never do ; Longfellow never did. When the gov- 
 ernment acted like fools, as governments do sometimes, he always 
 smoothed us down, and, in general, kept us in good temper. We 
 used to call him " the Head," which meant, head of the Modern 
 Language Department. One could then pick up a decent, ready 
 knowledge of the modern languages in the course of the four 
 years. No effort was made to speak or write them, and this, I 
 think, was wise. 
 
 But the good of a college is not in the things which it teaches. 
 I believe the " New Education " thinks it is, but that is the mis- 
 take of the New Education. The good of a college is to be had 
 from " the fellows " who are there, and your associations with 
 them. With a small circle of admirable friends, of whom this 
 world is by no means worthy, and to a less degree in the vari- 
 ous clubs, even in the much abused debating societies, I picked 
 up a set of habits and facilities for doing things one has to do, 
 for which I am very grateful to Harvard College. I disliked the 
 drudgery of college life, through and through. I counted the 
 
16 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 days to the next vacation from the beginning of every term, and 
 there were then, alas, three terms in every year. But, none the 
 less, I ought to say, that I do not believe that any life outside of 
 a college has been yet found that will in general do so much for a 
 man in helping him for this business of living. I could get more 
 information out of " Chambers's Encyclopaedia," which you can 
 buy for ten dollars, than any man will acquire, as facts, by spend- 
 ing four years in any college. But the business of changing a 
 boy into a man, or, if you please, changing an unlicked cub into 
 a well-trained gentleman, is, on the whole, more simply and cer- 
 tainly done in a good college than anywhere else. So, as Nestor 
 says, "it seems to me." 
 
 The Forum hardly expects me to give my notions as to the 
 best method of educating a man for the Christian ministry. In 
 that calling, the best and happiest thus far known to men, I have 
 spent my life. 
 
 This record of three schools and a college, which, because I 
 have been asked, I have attempted, is not the record of my edu- 
 cation. I owe my education chiefly to my father, my mother, 
 and my older brother — none of whom are now living. My father 
 always took it for granted that his children were interested in 
 what was worthy of interest, and, if he were engaged in it, he 
 made us partakers of his life. He introduced the railway system 
 into New England. When I was eleven years old, I held 
 his horse on the salt marshes by Charles Eiver while he was 
 studying routes, grades and distances. He would come back to 
 his " chaise " and explain to me the plans and the necessities, as 
 if I had been his equal. I doubt if I were twelve years old when 
 he gave me a scrap of French, in the "Journal des Debats," about 
 excavations in Assyria, and asked me to translate it for his news- 
 paper. He intrusted all of us with delicate and difficult com- 
 missions, while we ranked as boys. He gave us his entire confi- 
 dence, and never withdrew it. I remember coming to him in a 
 rage at some absurdity of a little man to whom the college ha(i 
 given some authority. I wanted to leave the college and be done 
 with the whole crew of them. My father showed me at once that 
 he had more respect for my judgment than for that of my op- 
 pressor ; that in human life we all have to deal with inferior 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 17 
 
 men, and must not quarrel with that necessity ; and sent meback 
 to my drudgery well satisfied because I could not lose his regard. 
 He made me a man by treating me as a man should be treated. 
 I am sure that fathers cannot overestimate the value of such 
 direction of the education of their sons. 
 
 My older brother was at an early age an accomplished mathe- 
 matician, and afterward a wonderfully well read man ; indeed 
 a person of very wide accomplishments, as of a most kindly and 
 affectionate nature. "We were forever together, in boyhood and 
 in college. I learned very little where he did not go before me 
 and show me the way. And this I should like to say to any 
 puzzled teacher : if you have ever a pupil to whom you cannot 
 explain some mystery of arithmetic, bid an older boy, on whom 
 you can rely, take the little fellow into another room, where 
 they can work it out together. It will be made plain. 
 
 After I left college I was an usher in the Latin School, then 
 under the admirable lead of Mr. Dixwell. I was a teacher of 
 Latin and Greek there for two years. As I have said, the nat- 
 ural fondness for language then came back on me, in teaching the 
 two languages to amiable and bright boys. To some of those 
 boys, therefore, I owe all the pleasure which I have ever since 
 derived from Latin and Greek literature — not to my college 
 teachers, who made me hate the languages. 
 
 To sum up : my experience with schools and with the college 
 teaches me to distrust all the mechanisms of education. One 
 comes back to Mr. Emerson's word, " It is little matter what you 
 learn, the question is with whom you learn." There are teachers 
 to whom I am profoundly and eternally indebted. Of all those 
 with whom I have ever had to do, I owe the most to my father, 
 my mother, and my older brother. 
 
SECOND PAPER. 
 By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 
 
 Iisr Pope's once famous " Recollections of P. P., Clerk of this 
 Parish," the original materials for the work are described as 
 being contained in a large manuscript volume, which might 
 well be lettered, the author says, " On the Importance of a Man 
 to Himself." Every piece of autobiography, however slight or 
 indirect, might be classed under this title; and perhaps that 
 man is fortunate who finds, as in the present case, an editor who 
 consents to assume the responsibility of the whole enterpise. The 
 Forum desires, it seems, to obtain from a few authors an honest 
 statement of their educational experience, good or bad, for encour- 
 agement or for warning, as the case may be. If we could truly 
 respond to this demand the result would certainly be useful, 
 since the secret of our success or failure might thus be revealed ; 
 and even our other work might perhaps assume a slightly in- 
 creased value, because connected with so frank a commentary. 
 
 My literary life, such as it has been, affords no lesson 
 greatly worth recording, unless it be the facility with which a 
 taste for books may be transmitted and accumulated from one 
 generation to another, and then developed into a life-long pur- 
 suit by a literary environment. To go no farther back, my pa- 
 ternal ancestors in America were Puritan clergymen, who wrote 
 many books, a few of which are still quoted; my paternal 
 grandfather was the supposed author of the " Laco " letters, 
 which were aimed against John Hancock, and were thought by 
 the zealous Bostonians of their day to rival Junius ; my father 
 wrote several pamphlets, and my mother some children's books, 
 in one or two of which I figured ; my eldest brother wrote a 
 little book against slavery. All this must surely have been 
 enough to guarantee a little infusion of printer's ink into my 
 blood. Then as to externals ; my father, having lost a moderate 
 fortune by Jefferson's embargo, came to Cambridge and became 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 19 
 
 Steward — or as it is now called Bursar — of Harvard College. 
 He built a house, in which I was born, at the head of a street 
 then called Professors' Row, because so many professors lived on 
 it, but now known as Kirkland Street. This house then stood 
 just outside of the college grounds, and is now almost surrounded 
 by them, having the Lawrence Scientific School close beside it 
 and the Jefferson Physical Laboratory behind. Soon, probably, 
 it will be ingulfed and make way for some great academic 
 structure, as has been the case with the " gambrel-roofed house," 
 once its next-door neighbor, and the birthplace of Dr. 0. W. 
 Holmes. 
 
 I was thus born and cradled within the college atmosphere, and 
 amid a world of books and bookish men, the list of these last in- 
 cluding many since famous, who were familiar visitors at our 
 house. My small collection of autographs is headed by a note in 
 the exquisite handwriting of Edward Everett, inquiring after the 
 health of "the babe," and offering in behalf of Mrs. Everett to 
 send some tamarind water, I being the unfortunate infant for 
 whom — or perhaps for whose mother — that unpleasing medica- 
 ment was designed. My first nurse, if not a poet, was the theme 
 of poetry, being one Rowena Pratt, the wife of Longfellow's 
 " Tillage Blacksmith ;" and no doubt her singing made the heart 
 of her young charge rejoice, as when she sang in that paradise 
 to which the poet has raised her. Later, I "tumbled about in a 
 library," as Holmes recommends, and in the self-same library 
 where he practiced the like gymnastics ; that of his kind old 
 father, Dr. Abiel Holmes, whose grandson, now Dr. C. W. Par- 
 sons, of Providence, was my constant playmate. At home 
 the process could be repeated in a comfortable library of Queen 
 Anne literature in delightful little old-fashioned editions, on 
 which I began to browse as soon as the period of " Sandford and 
 Merton " and Mrs. Edgeworth's " Frank " had passed. 
 
 It passed early, for it was the custom in those days to teach 
 children to read, and sometimes to write, before they were four 
 years old — a practice now happily discontinued. Another more 
 desirable custom prevailed in the household, for my mother read 
 aloud a great deal in the evening ; and I thus became familiar 
 with Scott's novels as I sat gazing in the fire or lay stretched in 
 
20 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 delicious indolence upon the hearth-rug. Literature was also 
 brought freely in from without. I remember that Jared Sparks 
 used to come with whole portfolios of Washington's and Frank- 
 lin's letters — which he was then editing — and leave them for the 
 household to look over ; and I can recall Dr. Palfrey's reading 
 Hawthorne's "Kill from the Town Pump" to my mother, dur- 
 ing a morning call, with the assurance on his part that the 
 author, then almost unknown, was worthy attention. Judge 
 Story, then esteemed the most brilliant of Americans, was some- 
 times at our house ; as was my cousin Henry Cleveland, the in- 
 timate friend of Sumner, and a most cultivated scholar. Marga- 
 ret Fuller was there a familiar guest, and so were the sisters of 
 Professor Longfellow, not yet a citizen of Cambridge. Later, 
 Lowell and Story were my schoolmates, though five years older ; 
 and when to all this early circle of literary persons was added 
 the unconscious weight of academic influence behind, with all 
 the quaint bookish characteristics of that earlier Cambridge, it 
 will be seen that merely to have lived in such a milieu was the 
 beginning of a literary training. This must be my justification 
 for dwelling on items which would otherwise be without interest 
 to any one but myself ; they indicate the class of influences 
 which not only made a writer out of me, but accomplished a 
 similar result for Hedge, Holmes, Margaret Fuller, Lowell and 
 Norton. No small town in America has given birth to so many 
 professional authors, I believe, as Cambridge ; for the Concord 
 authors were not generally natives of the town. 
 
 My father's financial losses secured for me a valuable combi- 
 nation of circumstances — the tradition of social refinement united 
 with the practice of economy. This last point was farther em- 
 phasized by his death when I was ten years old; and I, as the 
 youngest of a large family, was left to be brought up mainly 
 by women, and fortunately by those whom I*was accustomed 
 to seeing treated with intellectual respect by prominent men. 
 Their influence happily counteracted a part of that received 
 from an exceedingly rough school to which I was sent at eight 
 years old, after a few years' experience under a woman's teach- 
 ing. The school of which I speak was kept by a well-educated 
 Englishman, William Wells, a most painstaking and worthy 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 21 
 
 teacher and a good classical scholar — he having edited the first 
 American edition of Cicero — but one whose boarding-school was 
 conducted essentially on the old English plan, and was some- 
 what brutalizing in its effect on the boys. Yet it was then con- 
 sidered the best preparatory school in the neighborhood of Bos- 
 ton, and the children of the most influential families in that city 
 were sent to it. Being only a day scholar, and walking a mile 
 each way, twice a day, beneath the beautiful trees which then 
 shaded Brattle Street, I have mainly pleasurable associations 
 with the period; the more especially as, being one of the more 
 studious pupils, I rarely felt the weight of the birch which was 
 never absent from Mr. Wells's hand In an essay " On an old 
 Latin Text Book " I have recorded some of the enjoyments of 
 that time. 
 
 At thirteen I entered Harvard College, being already very 
 tall for my age and of mature appearance, with some precocity 
 of intellect and a corresponding immaturity of character — an in- 
 convenient combination which perplexed me till my graduation 
 at the absurdly early age of seventeen. It is an odd coincidence 
 that Mr. Hale, who has preceded me in this course, was just two 
 years older, both in years and in date of graduation, each of us 
 being the youngest in his class and each holding the same rank 
 in that small body. "We might therefore be supposed to take 
 identical views of college life, but this is not quite the case ; I 
 perhaps rating the value of strict discipline higher than he does, 
 and at any rate having liked everything that was taught in the 
 college, though often wishing for things that were not there 
 attainable. But I had the great advantage over my predecessor 
 in this series that the elective system, which in his time only 
 covered the choice between the different modern languages, was 
 extended during my course to a variety of studies, although the 
 experiment was only temporary, and was afterward unaccount- 
 ably withdrawn. As to mathematical instruction this reform was 
 an especial benefit, for Professor Peirce's genius reveled in the new 
 sensation of having voluntary pupils, and he gave a few of us 
 his " Curves and Functions " as lectures, with running elucida- 
 tions. Nothing could be more stimulating than to see our 
 ardent instructor, suddenly seized with a new thought and for- 
 
22 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 getting our very existence, work away rapidly with the chalk 
 upon a wholly new series of equations ; and then, when he had 
 forced himself into the utmost corner of the black-board and 
 could get no farther, to see him come back to earth with a sigh 
 and proceed with his lecture. We did not know whither he was 
 going, but that huddle of new equations seemed like a sudden 
 outlet from this world and a ladder to the stars. He gave a 
 charm to the study of mathematics which for me has never 
 waned, although the other pursuits of life soon drew me from 
 that early love. This I have always regretted, and so did 
 Peirce, who fancied that I had some faculty that way, and had 
 me put, when but eighteen, on a committee to examine the 
 mathematical classes of the college. Long after, when I was 
 indicted for the attempted rescue of a fugitive slave, and the 
 prison walls seemed impending, I met him in the street and told 
 him that if I were imprisoned I should have time to read La 
 Place's "Mecanique Celeste." "In that case," said the pro- 
 fessor, who abhorred the abolitionists, "I sincerely wish you 
 may be." 
 
 But the elective system could go no farther than the studies 
 actually carried on in college, and the range of those studies 
 was then small. Of all the world of modern science we had but 
 a few experiments in chemistry or electricity, and a few recita- 
 tions from memory in Smellie's " Philosophy of Natural History." 
 A few of us joined a voluntary class in entomology with Dr. 
 Harris ; and we carried on for ourselves a natural history so- 
 ciety, without guidance and in the crudest way. "With a strong 
 love for all the natural sciences, I am sure that I have perma- 
 nently suffered from the want of such systematic early training 
 as is now accessible to every student. But it was not such as I 
 who were the worst sufferers — omnivorous persons, who loved 
 all study and found plenty to occupy our time. The real suf- 
 ferers were those whose instinct led them to the natural sciences 
 and to nothing else, who were born observers, and went straight 
 to the details of out-door knowledge as a bee goes to a flower. 
 One of my class-mates lately died in Worcester — Rufus Wood- 
 ward, M.D. — who was, as I have always thought, one of the very 
 ablest men in the class, yet stood near the foot of it all through 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 23 
 
 college simply because he had no outlet. In these days he 
 could hardly have failed to gradute with high honors in two or 
 three scientific departments ; and he would at any rate have been 
 recognized, stimulated, trained and kept at work. For want of this 
 his college life was well-nigh wasted, perhaps worse than wasted, 
 for it impaired the habit of systematic application ; and though 
 a fairly successful practicing physician, he remained always in 
 some degree an amateur in the sciences of which he might have 
 been made a distinguished ornament. He suffered more than 
 others, as being a born specialist, but the one-sidedness of the 
 curriculum hurt us all. 
 
 We all suffered, too, from the fact that we were not encouraged 
 or even permitted to do thorough work in anything. We lived 
 intellectually from hand to mouth, or from book to mouth, which 
 is worse. It was lamentable to see a man like President James 
 Walker, who might have grasped our young minds and trained 
 them to explore the hard problems of ethics and metaphysics, 
 obliged to sit, pencil in haud, while we recited the words of the 
 book, he meanwhile giving half the power of his fine intellect to 
 deciding whether our little performance should be valued at 
 "seven" marks or at "eight." We had no extended exami- 
 nations, obliging us to review our whole knowledge on a given 
 subject ; we wrote no theses, such as now give the student the 
 opportunity, if only for once in his life, to learn what real re- 
 search means. Our study of Latin and Greek might or might 
 not be accurate, but it was mainly grammatical. Once or twice, 
 when the elective system was first brought to bear on us, the ac- 
 complished Felton attempted a few lectures on Greek life and 
 mythology, but they were soon dropped ; the mere labor of call- 
 ing up for recitation his large class and awarding to each the 
 little meed of marks was quite enough for him. At graduation 
 I could read simple Greek or Latin easily enough, and this was 
 something ; but of the world of ancient art or manners we all 
 knew little. I had a useful lesson on this subject, not long 
 after my graduation, from a lively young girl, whose training, 
 though briefer, had been more comprehensive. We were look- 
 ing at some small casts of Greek friezes, and I was kind enough, 
 as became a young Harvard alumnus, to explain them to her. I 
 
24 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 called her attention to the graceful figures of the young riders in 
 the bas-relief ; and said how strange it was that the Greeks, who 
 delineated human beings so well, should have made their horses 
 so clumsy — with such thick necks, I said. "But," said she, 
 " did not the Thessalian horses have those thick necks ? " Alas, 
 I did not even know that the Greek horses came from Thessaly ! 
 
 It does not seem to me, in looking back, that the Harvard 
 teaching was then as good in any respect as it is now, except 
 in English, where I do not see that it could have been much 
 bettered for working purposes. On the philological side, cer- 
 tainly, even this was not strong — nobody then studied Anglo- 
 Saxon or Sanskrit — but as regarded sense and simplicity and 
 methodical arrangement, and the supreme importance of having 
 something to say, Prof. Edward Channing's criticism and hints 
 were invaluable. I suppose that to this day I rarely write for 
 three hours without half-consciously recalling some caution or 
 suggestion of his ; and it is certainly a great deal for a teacher 
 thus to impress himself upon a pupil's life. His praise of one's 
 composition, even if he named no names, gave a thrill of de- 
 light ; and his reading of favorite passages from authors, even 
 if only the citations from Campbell's " Ehetoric," left a lasting 
 pleasure. In the department of oratory, which also fell to him, 
 he was less successful ; and although I have been, all my life, a 
 public speaker as well as a writer, I cannot recall any suggestion 
 given, during our course in that branch, that ever helped me at 
 all ; unless it were a few hints as to variety of gesture from his 
 assistant, Mr. E. H. Dana. It is my impression that no man is 
 much benefited as a speaker of his own thoughts by reciting 
 those of other people ; and indeed I suspect that the orator is 
 almost as much born as the poet, in spite of Cicero's dictum to 
 the contrary. 
 
 In saying that no other department was as well administered 
 as now, it would not be fair to ignore the debt we owed to several 
 other teachers. To Jared Sparks, himself a rather unimagina- 
 tive man, I owe the early conviction, confirmed by reading Haw- 
 thorne, that imagination is a desirable quality for an historian. 
 The teachers of modern languages did much for us ; I had fortu- 
 nately been fairly grounded in French, in childhood, by a cousin 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 25 
 
 who "had lived long in Paris; and Professor Longfellow's in- 
 structions always had a charm, not diminished by the eager in- 
 terest inspired by his " Hyperion," and by the proof-sheets of 
 " Voices of the Night," brought occasionally to the recitation- 
 room by the printer's boy. As Peirce had, as it were, shown us 
 science in the making, so this was literature in the making. It 
 was an advantage also to read Dante with a cultivated Italian 
 exile, Pietro Bachi, whose vigorous accent made the strong lines 
 impressive; and for Spanish we had delightful old Francisco 
 Sales, whose powdered hair and pigtail seemed a perpetual scene 
 from "Gil Bias." German was not then so much sought for as 
 now, and I, unfortunately, did not study it until after leaving 
 college. 
 
 The influence of feminine society was of course an essential 
 part of one's college education ; and all this was then very at- 
 tractive and simple in the little village, where the large influx of 
 Southern law-students just then gave much vivacity to social 
 intercourse. A world of new poetry and literature was more- 
 over just beginning ; Tennyson's thin early volumes were being 
 handed about and seemed to bring a richer coloring into the uni- 
 verse ; Carlyle was talked of in the evening by my elder brothers, 
 and one day the fresh wit and wisdom of " Pickwick " came to 
 delight us all, when my mother read it aloud. " The Dial " was 
 seen in the house sometimes, as my cousin, William Henry Chan- 
 ning, was one of the contributors. Emerson had often lectured 
 in Cambridge, and his first volume of essays had just appeared. 
 This was given to me by my mother, and was read as I never had 
 read any other book, I having been first led to it by my friend, 
 Levi Lincoln Thaxter, since well-known in this vicinity as an 
 interpreter of Browning. He introduced me also to Hazlitt, then 
 a favorite with young men of literary tastes ; we read Percy's 
 " Eeliques of Ancient Poetry " together, and had a common faith 
 in the dawning genius of Lowell, whose " Year's Life " had just 
 appeared. 
 
 I graduated at about the time when young men now enter col- 
 lege — seventeen and a half years ; and spent two years in teach- 
 ing before I came back for post-graduate studies to Cambridge. 
 Those two years were perhaps the most important in my life. 
 
26 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 Most of them were passed in the family of a cousin, the late 
 Stephen Higginson Perkins, of Brookline, where I taught his 
 three fine boys, of one of whom I afterward wrote a memoir 
 in the " Harvard Memorial Biographies." All my experience 
 of college instructors had given me no such personal influence 
 as that of my cousin, and it so fell in with the tendencies of 
 that seething period — the epoch of Brook Farm, of receding 
 Transcendentalism, of dawning Fourierism — that it simply devel- 
 oped more methodically what would probably have come at any 
 rate. My cousin was born an artist and bred a merchant ; he 
 was an Athenian in his love of beauty, and a Spartan in personal 
 habits ; lived with the greatest frugality, yet would have a pri- 
 vate tutor for his boys ; took care of his own horse and stable 
 and furnace, yet had bought and kept two or three of the most 
 costly paintings then to be found near Boston — a Vandervelde, 
 a Joshua Reynolds, and a fine oil copy of the Sistine Madonna 
 by Moritz Retzch. "With this last my own glimpses into the 
 world of art began, and I wrote at nineteen some verses about 
 it which Professor Longfellow did me the honor to reprint in his 
 "Estray." These pictures Stephen Perkins bequeathed to the 
 Boston Art Museum. When I came to him I had begun the 
 study of the law and all my ambition lay that way ; but his un- 
 conscious attrition, combined with the prevailing tendencies of 
 the time, turned me from that pursuit and from all " bread- 
 studies," as they used then to be called, toward literature and 
 humanitarian interests. 
 
 Stephen Perkins belonged to a type of merchants created by 
 the East India trade, and, so far as I can see, extinguished with 
 it. He had spent his boyhood at school in Germany and his 
 youth in the East Indies. He had thus had a cosmopolitan life, 
 and had been, during long voyages, an immense reader of English, 
 French and German, while he knew nothing of the classics. He 
 was also an ardent admirer of Carlyle, whose direct influence 
 upon myself had been very much less, since Emerson had done 
 for me what Carlyle did for others. It happened that a lady 
 who lived near us in Brookline, Mrs. Thomas Lee, had just 
 written a " Life " of Jean Paul Richter, and this was for me an 
 epoch-making book. In this and in his " Fruit, Flower and 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 27 
 
 Thorn-Pieces," reprinted soon after in an English version, I 
 found a picture of what would now be called " plain living and 
 high thinking," which converted me forever, and made it seem 
 easy to make sacrifices in order to pursue one's own studies and 
 live one's own life. Mrs. Child's "Letters from New York" also 
 had an influence in the same direction. Then came the "Social 
 Reform " conventions which preceded Fourierism, and of which 
 the inspiring spirit was another cousin, already mentioned, 
 "William Henry Channing. Already, before leaving college, I 
 had felt a great desire to ally myself with all classes of people 
 and see with their eyes ; and with this came a Quixotic purpose, 
 possibly imbibed with the milk of good Rowena Pratt, of giv- 
 ing a year to the blacksmith's trade for this sole purpose. I 
 have often regretted that the project went no farther. Undoubt- 
 edly the literary man works, on the whole, harder than the 
 mechanic ; but I should like to have known for a few months 
 the sensation of earning the day's wages by the labor of the 
 hands ; and to have penetrated personally behind that perplex- 
 ing door of non-communication which separates, after all, the life 
 of the mechanic from that of the professional man. 
 
 I came back to Cambridge expecting to fit myself for some 
 professorship in philology, or metaphysics, or natural science. 
 Not knowing exactly what the result would be, I devoted two 
 happy years to an immense diversity of reading, in which Ger- 
 man literature on the whole predominated — I having learned 
 something of that language by a process of self -teaching, intro- 
 duced by a learned German who, about this time, was lecturing in 
 Boston — Dr. Charles Kraitser. Moved by him I made my way, 
 through sheer reading and dictionary work, with small regard 
 for Ollendorff, and dabbled in other cognate languages — Dutch, 
 Danish, Swedish — at the same time; even beginning the transla- 
 tion of Tegner's " Frithiof's Saga," and of a novel by Frederica 
 Bremer. So far as the thorough knowledge of any language went, 
 it was all a mistake, but it was very pleasant ; and I am firm 
 in the opinion that it is a good thing for a young man naturally 
 studious to have a year or two of intellectual wild-oats, when he 
 reads just what he pleases, with none to molest him or make him 
 afraid. Circumstances and certain influences drew me at last 
 
28 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 aside to the liberal ministry; a thing which I have never 
 regretted, though it occupied me only temporarily, and I gravi- 
 tated back to literature at last. 
 
 There were some students of marked attainments and in- 
 fluence at Cambridge during this time, especially Edward 
 Tuckerman, now Professor at Amherst College, an enthusiast in 
 botany and Coleridge ; with him I took long walks, and tried to 
 comprehend lichens and the "Aids to Eeflection." At this time, 
 also, the Anti- Slavery Eeform took hold of me, as of many others, 
 and was itself a liberal training ; nor do I see where the young 
 students of the present day can encounter any such group of 
 strong and heroic men as were our instructors there. Two years 
 of this desultory life and two years of more systematic work in 
 the Theological School were all that was left for me of academical 
 existence. This was my so-called education ; but when I finally 
 parted company with the University, I had made the discovery 
 that my education was just beginning, and I have ever since 
 been trying to carry it along. Perhaps this was an adequate re- 
 sult for twenty-three and a half years of life. With an omnis- 
 cient adviser at my elbow, it might probably have been bettered ; 
 but no such person was at that time accessible in Harvard Uni- 
 versity, nor can I see that he has since been developed there or 
 elsewhere. 
 
 The key-note of that early life was best struck for me in a 
 phrase used by Emerson in his " Man the Eeformer :" "Better 
 that the book should not be quite so good and the book-maker 
 himself abler and better ; and not himself often a ludicrous con- 
 trast to all he has written." It is a phrase that possibly needs to 
 be kept before us in this age of multiplying specialists ; and it is 
 after all only an amplification of Sir Philip Sidney's terse aphor- 
 ism in the " Defence of Poesie :" " The ending end of all earthly 
 learning being virtuous action." 
 
THIRD PAPER. 
 By PRESIDENT F. A. P. BARNARD. 
 
 " Next," is tlie order which I hear from the Editor of The 
 Foeum ; and I rise with a diffidence naturally engendered by 
 doubt of my title to a place on his select roster of battered veter- 
 ans in life's difficult struggle. But if to be a veteran and to be 
 battered constitute a sufficient justification of my nomination to 
 such a distinction, I will not shrink from the honor bestowed on 
 me. 
 
 That particular one of these veterans by whom this series was 
 inaugurated modestly accounted for the conspicuousness of his 
 position by ascribing it to a consideration such as led the Indian 
 commander to send forward a little elephant to pioneer a risky 
 passage. To his successors this seems a little as if Jumbo, in 
 heading a procession of "the greatest show on earth" down Fifth 
 Avenue, were to remark casually to the admiring crowds on the 
 sidewalks, "Don't mind me, I'm only a small pattern; look at that 
 long row of big elephants behind me." As for myself I can 
 hardly claim to be an elephant at all ; for when I ask myself the 
 question " How was I educated ? " there immediately arises the 
 embarrassing counter-question, " Was I in fact ever educated at 
 all ? " If by education is meant a result of influences exerted by 
 other minds acting on and giving shape to my own, I should find 
 it difficult to point out when, where, and to what extent such 
 influences had produced their effect upon me. Not that I have 
 not had teachers enough. I have had probably more than my 
 share ; but their personal relations to me, as I recall them, seem 
 to have consisted chiefly in " setting " me lessons, in listening to 
 my recitations (generally verbatim repetitions of a text), correct- 
 ing my blunders (that is to say, giving me the right word when 
 I used the wrong one), and telling me I had "better mind" when 
 I was restless or disorderly. 
 
 But though I am unable to tell distinctly how I was edu- 
 
30 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 cated, I find no difficulty in giving an account of the attempts 
 which were made to educate me. It was in the district school of 
 my native village that I underwent my first scholastic experi- 
 ence. I was about three years of age, possibly a few months 
 older, when my tuition began, and I was conducted to the school 
 by my sister, two years my senior, who had been earlier matric- 
 ulated in this institution. I had but one sister — my senior as 
 just mentioned — and one brother also, my junior, so that I had 
 taken by anticipation the very judicious advice of Dr. Hale, and 
 had been "born in the middle of a family." I found in this 
 school some sixty or seventy children of both sexes and of all 
 ages up to eighteen or twenty, but I did not understand what 
 they were all there for, and the scholastic exercises puzzled me. 
 "When the reading classes stood up and made a botch of it, I 
 wondered why they could not read. I could read before I went 
 to school. How it happened I did not know. I supposed it was 
 natural to do so. Probably I acquired the ability from the same 
 source from which I derived almost everything else in me that is 
 good (if there is any such thing), from my mother's careful teach- 
 ing. I did not like school. There was but one pleasing incident 
 in the oppressive three-hour session ; it was when the glad an- 
 nouncement from the master was heard, " The boys may go out 
 to play." 
 
 I was not long in the district school. When I had reached 
 the age of about four years there was opened in our village what 
 was called a Grammar School, conducted by a young graduate of 
 Williams College of singular ability and unusual attainments, 
 who later in life achieved a brilliant reputation, and became one 
 of the most distinguished pulpit orators in Boston and afterwards 
 in New York, the Rev. Orville Dewey. I was not sufficiently ad- 
 vanced in age to be introduced to the high curriculum of the 
 Grammar School, but it seemed to be the proper place for my 
 sister, and I was sent along with her, to keep me out of mischief, 
 I suppose. I was not required to study anything, but some 
 things which I heard there interested me, especially Mr. Dewey's 
 prelections to his class in geography. 
 
 When I had reached the mature age of six years, it seemed 
 meet to my father that I should be introduced to the study of 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 31 
 
 the humanities. To this end he made arrangements with the 
 clergyman of our village to instruct me in the rudiments of the 
 Latin tongue. I became one of the select class which that rever- 
 end worthy had consented to receive as day -scholars into his 
 house. What I was expected to study at this time was the Latin 
 grammar and the reading book for beginners then in vogue, en- 
 titled "Corderii Colloquia." But the spirit of study was not in 
 me nor in any of us. We idled away our time, the teacher was 
 careless and inattentive, and after a few months of trial the 
 scheme broke down. I was then placed under the tuition of a 
 private tutor. My father, being by profession a lawyer, had 
 usually one or more students reading in his office ; and one of 
 these was rash enough to take in hand a pupil in whose ante- 
 cedents there was so little to encourage. Then ensued a year or 
 two of the most trying experience of my life — a period equally 
 painful, I presume, to torturer and victim — in which my tutor 
 was resolved that I should learn Latin, and I was equally resolved 
 that I would not ; but the result naturally was that the stronger 
 will prevailed, and that, when the struggle was over, I knew the 
 whole grammar from beginning to end, rules and exceptions, 
 Etymology, Syntax and Prosody, word for word, by heart. But 
 I did not understand a syllable of it ; and so, in order to facilitate 
 fixing the sentences in my mind, I used to break them up into 
 little bits or versicles, which I could balance against each other in 
 a kind of chant, thus : " Verbal adjectives | or such as signify [ 
 affections of the mind | govern the genitive." I had, however, at 
 this time a better reading-book than before ; so good a one that 
 I wish I could see it again. It was "Farrand's Course of Latin 
 Study," a book long since lost to human sight, but in which the 
 substance of the lessons was so entertaining as to reconcile me in 
 the end to the language in which they were written. 
 
 While my scholastic education was thus proceeding I was 
 undergoing a rather unsystematic but very beneficial species of 
 mental culture derived from reading. From my earliest years I 
 had a passion for books ; and, though juvenile literature had 
 little to boast of in those days, such as there was I gathered as I 
 could and carefully treasured up. My library embraced a rather 
 curious miscellany, ranging from the "Melodies of Mother 
 
32 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 Goose" up to " Robinson Crusoe" and the "Pilgrim's Progress." 
 But I very early became familiar with, and formed a taste for an 
 order of literature much superior to this. My father himself put 
 Shakespeare into my hands before I was six years old. I greatly 
 enjoyed the comedies, but the tragedies and the historical dramas 
 were for the time above my level. My mother also, who was a 
 passionate reader, intoduced me to Cowper, Burns, Goldsmith, 
 Campbell, Scott, and Byron, among the poets, and to Addison, 
 Johnson, Burke, Robertson, and others among the prose writers. 
 I read also with great interest "Rollin's Ancient History." Voy- 
 ages and travels were, however, my special delight, and the book 
 of this class which afforded me the greatest gratification was the 
 narrative published by Professor Silliman of his journeyings 
 through England, Holland and Scotland in 1805 and 1806. This 
 took so strong a hold upon my imagination that it became the 
 most earnest desire of my life to see and know the author. And 
 I was troubled with the painful apprehension that, before I 
 should be mature enough to gain admission to college, this fasci- 
 nating writer might have passed off the stage. How needless 
 was this concern appears in the fact that Professor Silliman sur- 
 vived my graduation by more than thirty-six years. During the 
 first ten years of my life I profited by this general though desul- 
 tory reading more than by all the efforts of all my instructors. 
 
 Another incitement to mental activity extremely beneficial 
 educationally, though unconnected with schools, was a propensity 
 early felt but which has followed me through life, to engage in 
 the construction of mechanical contrivances of one sort or an- 
 other. Among the achievements of my boyhood were wind- 
 mills, water-mills, fanning-mills, trip-hammers, sleds, barrows, 
 kites and cross-bows; and generally all those quarters of the 
 house which were frequented by me were littered with these 
 things. 
 
 At the age of nine years I went to reside with my maternal 
 grandfather, who had then recently taken up his residence in 
 the village of Saratoga Springs ; and I became there consequently 
 a pupil in a school of some pretensions called the Saratoga 
 Academy. In this school I began to take some interest in Latin, 
 and read through the " ^Eneid " and the " Georgics " of Virgil. 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 33 
 
 A copy of " Davidson's Yirgil " with an English prose transla- 
 tion having fallen into my hands, I found the story so fascina- 
 ting that I read it entirely through before I had completed the 
 first book of the original. I read also seven or eight of Cicero's 
 Orations, including the four against Cataline, and those in behalf 
 of Milo, Cluentius, the poet Archias, and the Manilian law. 
 
 Here, too, I began the study of Greek. To a boy of my day 
 this study was hardly less bewildering than the navigation of 
 the Sargasso Sea to Christopher Columbus. The only Greek 
 grammars in existence were written in Latin ; the only Greek 
 Lexicons obtainable gave only Latin definitions, and the lexicon 
 in general use was " Schrevellius," limited in vocabulary and 
 badly printed. The first Greek text to which I was introduced 
 was the Gospel according to St. John, a narrative which, for 
 simplicity of style and freedom from embarrassing idioms, seems 
 to me to this day to be the best example of written Greek which 
 can be placed in the hands of a beginner. From this I proceeded 
 to " Collectanea Graeca Minora," another of the excellent books 
 of earlier days, which has long since been laid upon the shelf. 
 Only recently a vagrant copy of this old book fell into my hands ; 
 and after reading it entirely through again, I laid it down with a 
 feeling of deep regret that it should have fallen into " desuetude," 
 a desuetude which in the interests of the rising generation I fear 
 is not "innocuous." 
 
 It was in the village of Saratoga that I first saw a printing 
 office. Nothing had ever more impressed my young imagination 
 than the mysteries of the typographical art, and nothing ever 
 afforded me more unalloyed delight than the opportunity I now 
 enjoyed to fathom these mysteries. I soon made acquaintance 
 with all the printers, and was indulged in my passionate desire 
 to be taught how to handle the " stick." I had at length a regu- 
 lar " case " assigned me, and for months I devoted to it all my 
 hours out of school. I learned to "compose," "impose," "cor- 
 rect " and to " distribute " type ; became in fact familiar with all 
 branches of the typographical art, except the working of the 
 press, to which my strength was not equal. But I learned to 
 wield the "balls" with a certain dexterity. It is to be remem- 
 bered that automatic printing was then unknown, and that even 
 
34 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 the ink-rollers now in universal use had not yet been invented. 
 My skill thus became such that, had I at any time in my life 
 been compelled to rely for subsistence on the labor of my hands, 
 I could easily have earned my living as a practical printer. Many 
 years later, on entering a printer's office in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and 
 observing a "stick-full" of "matter" standing by itself on an 
 " imposing stone," the spirit of the craft impelled me to pick it 
 up. Immediately there arose a loud outcry from all the printers 
 in the office, who expected to see the whole tumbled into a mass 
 of " pi." Setting it gently down I said to them, " Do not be con- 
 cerned, gentlemen, I am a printer myself." I was always after- 
 ward a great favorite in that office, for there is no craft in which 
 the feeling of brotherhood is stronger than the printers'. 
 
 It seems to me that my voluntary apprenticeship to the print- 
 er's trade was a by no means unimportant element of my edu- 
 cation. The "copy" which I "set up" embraced many pages 
 of instructive matter, and the hundreds of " takes " which I put 
 into type for the columns of the " Saratoga Sentinel " early fa- 
 miliarized me with political notions and the forms of political con- 
 troversy. But a principal advantage which I derived from this 
 experience was the confirmation in me of those habits of concen- 
 tration of thought and persevering industry to which I have 
 owed whatever of success may have attended me in life. 
 
 From Saratoga, at the age of twelve, I was transferred to a 
 school at Stockbridge, Mass., under the direction of a very capa- 
 ble instructor, Mr. Jared Curtis, or, as he was always called, 
 Major Curtis. In what service he had won his military rank I 
 never knew. In this school the scholastic influences were, I 
 think, less potent with me than at Saratoga ; but those which 
 proceeded from contact with " the other fellows " were exceed- 
 ingly energetic. We certainly found a great deal of time for 
 out-door sports, and this was divided between base-ball, drive- 
 ball, one, two, and three hole-cat, hop-scotch, and marbles. 
 
 It was at Stockbridge that I obtained my first notions of a 
 class of subjects which became subsequently the favorite pur- 
 suits of my life — subjects now embraced under the comprehen- 
 sive term, physics. An itinerant lecturer on these subjects vis- 
 ited Stockbridge and delivered a course of lectures on chemistry 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 35 
 
 and electricity, with experimental illustrations. The apparatus 
 used by him was very simple, and the display which he made 
 with it such as would now be pronounced contemptible ; but it 
 was intensely fascinating to me. The glimpses I thus obtained 
 of the operation of natural forces stimulated my desire to learn 
 more. I became an experimenter myself. By dint of much 
 labor, and by the conversion of many common vessels and uten- 
 sils to unaccustomed uses, I succeeded in creating quite a bat- 
 tery of philosophical instruments ; and I doubt if Davy or Far- 
 aday, in the laboratory of the Eoyal Institution, was ever hap- 
 pier than I was with my handful of metamorphosed pots and 
 pans around me. 
 
 I remained at Stockbridge until I had attained the age of 
 fifteen years complete. Thence I passed to New Haven. On the 
 7th day of September, 1824, I was examined for admission to 
 the Freshman class in Yale College, and was duly admitted. 
 Entrance examinations in those days were somewhat less formid- 
 able affairs than they are now, but I think they answered the 
 purpose quite as well. I was one of a squad of nine applicants. 
 The examination was oral, was conducted by a single examiner 
 in all the requisitions, and was completed in a single session. 
 Then, after we had been dismissed for a space in which " one 
 with moderate haste might tell an hundred," we were recalled 
 and informed that we were all admitted to the Freshman class. 
 
 There was one thing in the usages of that day at Yale on 
 which those of the present time are not an improvement. After 
 his entrance examination, a boy was either in college or he was 
 out of it. There were no half-way admissions, " on conditions," 
 as the phrase is, meaning that there is a supplementary exam- 
 ination to come by and by. A man might " scrape through," 
 as it was called, and be liable to founder further on ; but he 
 might also, with due diligence, even after such a peril, swing 
 clear and become in time a superior scholar — a thing of no in- 
 frequent occurrence. 
 
 The two or three years that followed my entrance into college 
 were years of earnest and persevering labor ; but although I was 
 apparently surrounded by so many educational influences, en- 
 joying also, or at least being supposed to enjoy, the instructions 
 
36 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 of so many eminent educators, it was a period of almost literal 
 self-education with me. There were two reasons for this ; the 
 first was that, in that day, no man at Yale who aspired to be 
 ranked as a scholar was permitted by public opinion to obtain 
 any assistance from any quarter whatever, even from his imme- 
 diate tutor, in preparing himself for his daily scholastic exer- 
 cises. He must stand up boldly before his class, relying on his 
 own resources exclusively, and "take his chance." If he ac- 
 quitted himself well, all due honor was awarded him; if he 
 "stuck" or "flunked," he lost caste in proportion to the gravity 
 of the case. Scholastic rank in college depended then, as liter- 
 ary or professional rank in the world depends always, upon the 
 consensus of opinion in the community which sees and judges 
 it. There was no such thing as an artificial grade founded on 
 an aggregate of numerical valuations of particular performances. 
 A man's superiority was acknowledged because it was felt, not 
 because he could point to a high " mark " on the term record. 
 It was for this reason that every man was constrained to show 
 what he was capable of doing without help. Hence frauds in 
 the class-room were practically impossible. To be seen once 
 sailing under false colors was nothing less than ruin. For this 
 reason students profited little from the aid of their instructors 
 in meeting current difficulties. As a partial compensation it was 
 allowed to seek such aid when the ordeal had been met ; but 
 even then it did not tend to exalt the reputation of a scholar to 
 avail himself of such a resource. 
 
 The other reason which seriously limited the magnitude of 
 my apparent advantages consisted in the fact that, according to 
 the usages then prevailing at Yale, a student scarcely came into 
 mental contact with a professor before his senior year. Every 
 class at entrance was broken up into divisions of about forty 
 students each, and a tutor was assigned to each such division 
 who remained its sole instructor, no matter what the variety of 
 subject, up to the end of the junior year. 
 
 No part of my training at Yale College seems to me, as I 
 look back upon it, to have been more beneficial than that which 
 I derived from the practice of writing and speaking in the liter- 
 ary society to which I belonged. These general societies, open 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 37 
 
 to students of all the classes, and numbering one or two hundred 
 members each, were maintained at that time with great enthusi- 
 asm. I am told that they are now extinct at New Haven. They 
 have been supplanted, I suppose, by the multiplicity of small 
 secret associations which decorate themselves with Greek letter 
 titles, but which, if they are literary at all, as they possibly are 
 (though I doubt), can never furnish the stimulus to effort which 
 the presence of a large audience always affords. I can only 
 regret the change. It seems to me that with the loss of her 
 literary societies half the glory has departed from Yale. In the 
 old Linonia Hall I spent many of the most profitable hours of 
 my college life ; and I witnessed there some debates which for 
 interest and brilliancy were equal to any at which I have been 
 privileged to be present in assemblies of much superior dignity 
 since. There were some men of my time who made no very 
 serious struggle for grade in scholarship, who yet would some- 
 times "come out strong" in the society; and for the sake of this 
 class of students, of which there will always be more or fewer in 
 college, I would esteem it a great benefit if the societies could be 
 resuscitated. 
 
 "When a young man has taken his degree of Bachelor of Arts, 
 it is customary to say of him that he has " completed his educa- 
 tion." As a rule, and at the moment, the phrase expresses very 
 well his own opinion of himself. But in so far as education con- 
 sists in the acquisition of knowledge, he will find himself soon 
 undeceived. It was so with me. In my undergraduate life I 
 thought rather favorably of my attainments. It was only after 
 graduation that I began to be conscious how little I knew. Com- 
 mencement occurred in my year on Wednesday, the 10th of 
 September, and on the Monday following I entered upon office 
 as a teacher in the Hartford Grammar School — an institution in 
 which for time out of mind it had been customary to break in 
 recent Yale graduates for service as tutors at Yale. As it was 
 my purpose, simultaneously with this occupation, to prosecute 
 my reading in physics and the higher mathematics, I became at 
 once aware that, with a knowledge of no other modern language 
 but my own, I could not make a step of satisfactory progress. It 
 
 seemed to me that I had a new education before me in which I 
 3 
 
38 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 must begin at the beginning. I took up first the French lan- 
 guage, and without a teacher, bj dint of hard study and resolute 
 perseverance, I fixed in my memory all the pronouns, connectives, 
 and irregular verbs contained in the tables of Levizac (the gram- 
 mar then in vogue), after which I learned to read rapidly. I 
 would not venture to claim that my method is the best. It is 
 not Mr. Sauveur's, I believe ; but any one who will try it, as I 
 did, will find it effectual. 
 
 The two years which I spent in the Hartford Grammar School 
 were more advantageous to me educationally than any other 
 equal period in the course of my life. But the educational proc- 
 ess did not end with them. I am not sure it is ended yet. But 
 having in my narrative reached my exitus e statu pupillari, I have 
 fulfilled the mandate of the editor of The Forum, and the re- 
 maining history is not to be written here. I would only remark 
 finally that, in my view of the matter, a man's education must be 
 mainly his own work. He may be helped or he may be embar- 
 rassed greatly by his environment; but neither books, nor 
 teachers, nor apparatus, nor other surrounding conditions of any 
 kind will be of any avail, unless he himself furnish the energiz- 
 ing spirit which shall put them to account. A mind is not 
 molded as an earthen vessel is fashioned by the hand of the 
 potter. It molds itself by virtue of an inherent force which 
 makes for symmetry or for deformity according to the direction 
 given it by consciousness and will. Libraries, universities, 
 museums, and foreign travel are powerful auxiliaries to a man 
 who is determined to be educated ; but he will find them of no 
 avail if he makes them anything more than secondary instru- 
 mentalities in the work. On the other hand, no lack of such 
 advantages will prevent a man from securing a valuable educa- 
 tion who is resolved to educate himself. Witness, for instance, 
 a Benjamin Franklin, a Hugh Miller, a Michael Faraday, and an 
 Abraham Lincoln. 
 
FOURTH PAPER. 
 By CHANCELLOR JOHN H. VINCENT. 
 
 Madame Neckar used to say, "It is never permissible to 
 say 'I say.'" The editor of The Forum does not accept this 
 law, designed to protect society from the egotists ; or else, with 
 full knowledge of its wisdom, he has deliberately become acces- 
 sory to its violation. He knows that the writers of the present 
 series, and not the editor, must bear whatever penalty may be 
 incurred. 
 
 In answer to a personal defense which I was once compelled 
 to write in the interest of the Church I represented, my opponent 
 reported the number of times I had in my article used the first 
 personal pronoun ; and, although this was no answer to my 
 argument, it was quite successful in producing for a moment a 
 feeling of mortification. What a harvest would my old antago- 
 nist find in the following pages were he disposed to continue 
 the count! And if Montaigne is right when he says that "a 
 man never speaks of himself without loss," I am certainly run- 
 ning great risk in accepting a commission to tell how I was edu- 
 cated, especially since the report I have to make is far from 
 being creditable to myself, inasmuch as I never was " educated " 
 in the sense in which the term is usually understood. If the 
 editor had asked, with that use of the perfect tense which em- 
 braces the past with an extension into the present, " How have 
 you been educated?" or if he had asked, "How are you being 
 educated ? " I should have given — well, I should have given the 
 very answer I am now about to pen. And I shall avail myself 
 of this opportunity for saying my say on the general subject of 
 education, as I have come to look at it through a little over 
 fifty -four years of the educational process ; and shall try to show 
 how I was delivered from the notion that education is princi- 
 pally a matter of schools and teachers, of text-books, tasks and 
 recitations ; and from that other notion that education belongs 
 
40 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 chiefly to the early years of one's life. Eeminiscence does not 
 bring my greatest joy as a student, for the present days are by 
 far my best days, since in them I am learning more, and loving 
 more to learn than ever before, since I opened my eyes on the 
 morning of February 23, 1832, in the old town of Tuscaloosa, 
 in the State of Alabama. The theory I have just advanced con- 
 cerning the extent of the educational process, embracing as it 
 does the whole of a life- time, will justify the wide autobiograph- 
 ical range which I take in the present article. 
 
 To state the matter fairly and fully at the outset, I must con- 
 fess that I have never been at college. The reader can scarcely 
 conceive the grief, made up of regret, discouragement, and mortifi- 
 cation which this fact occasioned me through most of the years 
 of my mature life. Even now I sometimes feel the sting of it 
 in the society of college men. It has been my "thorn in the 
 flesh." I have never found entire relief from its sharp prickings 
 in the long list of distinguished men and women in both hemi- 
 spheres and in all ages — writers, artists, sages, statesmen — who 
 never enjoyed the benefits of college training ; nor in recalling 
 the melancholy failure in so many ways of so many men who 
 have been matriculated, educated, graduated, and be-titled by the 
 greatest universities; nor in the "practical" man's notion that 
 classical education unfits a man for business. And certainly, I 
 have never felt the comfortable self-complacency which is some- 
 times attributed to the self-educated man. The, to me, un- 
 comfortable fact that I never even entered college, I have 
 through all these years honestly faced and deeply deplored. The 
 genuine regret which I have felt has supplied a large part of the 
 conviction and inspiration under which I am now working for 
 the increase of faith in the value of the college on the part of 
 the average American citizen and parent. By voice, by pen, by 
 example, in the ordering of my own son's education and by the 
 Chautauqua service, I have for many years devoted my energies 
 to the cause of the higher education ; and I make this statement 
 concerning my relation to the college to place myself with the 
 advocates of liberal culture as against the mistaken and merce- 
 nary theory of the utilitarian ; and thus I make humble protest 
 against the pitiable vanity of those self-educated men, who, not 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 41 
 
 content with making boast of personal achievement, depreciate 
 educational advantages which they failed to secure. 
 
 Of teachers and of schools, during my early years, I had 
 many. My father was a man of large intelligence, a great reader, 
 a good talker, a born debater, a man of sound sense, sterling 
 integrity, strong religious convictions; of good old long-lived 
 Huguenot stock, training his children to the highest family and 
 social self-respect; tracing his ancestry to the south of France 
 where my great-great-great-grandfather, Levi Vincent, was born 
 April 10, 1676. In early life my father left his birthplace, 
 Milton, Pa., and lived for many years in Alabama. There he 
 met and married my mother — my first teacher, my best teacher, 
 and the inspirer of my life even now, after these thirty-four 
 years of silence. She was beyond most women in all the best 
 qualities of motherhood, and to me, as Eichter says, she "has 
 made all other mothers venerable." With Tennyson I can 
 sing: 
 
 " Happy is he "with such a mother ! 
 Trust in all things high comes easy to him." 
 
 My earliest recollections of the formal educational methods are 
 connected with a little private school in Philadelphia, kept by a 
 good old woman whose name I have forgotten, under whose care 
 I was placed for a few weeks in 1837, while the family were en 
 route from Alabama to the Susquehanna Yalley. Then came 
 the administration of a governess, who taught my brother 
 and myself daily in an upper room of our home on the side 
 of Montour Eidge, near the mouth of Chillisquaque Creek, in 
 Central Pennsylvania. She gave us lessons in reading, spell- 
 ing, numbers, writing, history, geography, and manners. She 
 was as good as we restless boys would allow her to be, and we 
 cherish her memory to this day. How long this regime lasted I 
 cannot now remember ; but after it came several years of school- 
 life in Milton Academy, the Lewisburgh Academy, the old 
 " Sand Hill School House " at Chillisquaque, and the prepara- 
 tory department of the Lewisburgh University, under dear old 
 Doctor Taylor and his gifted son Alfred. Later on I spent a 
 
42 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 year in Newark, N. J., at the Wesley an Institute, which closed 
 my career as a formal student in a regular institution. 
 
 During these school years I studied all that any boy under 
 fifteen or sixteen was expected to study. I mastered Kirkham's 
 " English Grammar," and Murray's also ; I had all the definitions 
 and rules at tongue's end, and much of the " fine print." I could 
 parse glibly. I spent months in thus dissecting Milton's " Para- 
 dise Lost," and I nevertheless still revere the poem and its 
 author. I was drilled in Town's "Analysis." I read and 
 re-read the old "English Eeader" and Porter's "Ehetorical 
 Eeader." I studied Latin in those days, and knew the gram- 
 mar well; translated the "Eeader," "Cornelius Nepos," and 
 " Caesar ; " recited in Natural Philosophy (Comstock's), and in 
 Chemistry and Astronomy. I wrote compositions and made 
 declamations. I got along well with my teachers. They were, 
 with a single exception, kind, and I was studious. I was not a 
 remarkably bright or ready pupil, and, except under one teacher, 
 was never, I think, accounted dull or slow. Of that teacher 
 I have only this to say, that I have made the memory of his 
 injustice and severity serve me well, as they have warned me 
 against imitating him, and have enabled me to warn secular 
 teachers by the thousand against the sad and inexcusable mis- 
 takes he made. 
 
 I taught school for several terms, beginning the summer that 
 I was fifteen, in a little school-house near my father's house in 
 Chillisquaque. My last school was at Mechanicsville, near Col- 
 raine Forge, in Pennsylvania, in 1850-1851. I loved dearly to 
 teach, and was myself a student while I taught. I may not 
 here, for lack of space, recall the various devices by which I 
 made school-life a pleasurable experience to my pupils and a 
 means of discipline to myself. How well I remember the little 
 grove (adjoining the old Watsontown school-house, in Pennsyl- 
 vania), a small section of which, in 1848, my pupils and I in- 
 elosed with a rustic fence and provided with seats, thus creating 
 a miniature Chautauqua: there, on pleasant days, in the open 
 air, under the shade of the trees, amidst the singing of birds, we 
 drank in the fresh air of heaven, and studied our lessons with 
 renewed diligence. The warm grasp of the hand and the affec- 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 43 
 
 tionate allusion to the old school days which I occasionally re- 
 ceive from some former student, make me glad that I ever 
 taught, and make me prize more and more the high, helpful, 
 and holy office of the teacher. Through most of my career as a 
 pastor — from 1853 to 1865 — I kept up special classes in Biblical 
 history, geography, and interpretation, and in Sunday-school 
 normal work, prizing the service of teaching as a means of per- 
 sonal intellectual discipline. To teach honestly is to be a stu- 
 dent, and that under most favorable conditions ; for to teach, one 
 must know ; must know more than he expects to teach ; must 
 know how so to " put " knowledge as to bring other minds into 
 a receptive and active state toward knowledge ; and must him- 
 self feel that inspiration which comes from the contact between 
 eager minds — minds eager to know and minds eager to quicken 
 and to communicate. 
 
 The chief value of my almost continuous school-life as a 
 student for the first fifteen years, and of my school-life as a 
 teacher for nearly four years that followed, lay in my home-life 
 and its rare opportunities. My father was a reader, and had a 
 small but valuable library which he required his children to use. 
 I sometimes wish that I had owned Scott's writings in those 
 days, but fiction was not heartily approved in the old home. I 
 read "Eobinson Crusoe" and the "Swiss Family Eobinson," 
 Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " (which my father did not con- 
 sider a work of fiction), and a few other products of the imagi- 
 nation ; but I did read, and that before I was fifteen years of 
 age, "The Spectator," Gibbon's "Eome," Eollin's "Ancient His- 
 tory," Pitkin's " Civil and Political History of the United States," 
 Plutarch's " Lives," Pollock's " Course of Time," Young's " Night 
 Thoughts," "Paradise Lost," Thomson's "Seasons," Cowper's 
 " Task," Pope's " Essay on Man," and the general poems of Gold- 
 smith. Among these my favorites were " The Spectator " and 
 "The Seasons." I not only read but I studied them. Peter 
 Parley's histories were far more pleasant and useful to me in 
 those days than some of the statelier historical works I was 
 required to read. 
 
 My father had given much attention to the matter of cor- 
 rect pronunciation and expression, and made a point of hold- 
 
44 HOW 1 WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 ing his children to the use of good English. All mis-pro- 
 nunciations and all " bad grammar" which he detected were 
 condemned, and we, the children, were not only allowed but en- 
 couraged to call attention to whatever we thought improper in 
 the speech of each other, and of father himself. To this habit 
 of parental carefulness I owe more for what little knowledge of 
 English I have than to all my teachers and text-books put 
 together. Living for several years in a community where the 
 worst provincialisms prevailed, I was kept to a great degree from 
 falling into habits which it would have been hard in the after- 
 years to correct. 
 
 The religious element was an important factor in my early 
 training. My father was a strict disciplinarian and a firm Chris- 
 tian believer. Family prayer twice a day was the invariable 
 rule. Sabbath was a day of public and domestic worship, of 
 songs and prayer, and careful searchings of heart. The work of 
 the week-day in school, in business, and in recreation was on the 
 Sabbath brought to a rigid religious test. In all this there was 
 no harshness or severity ; it was simply placing emphasis upon 
 the greatest reality of human life. My mother was an incarna- 
 tion of consistency, fidelity, self-sacrifice, and serenity. I never 
 heard her speak one harsh or foolish word. She believed with 
 her whole soul in the truths of religion as taught by Jesus of 
 Nazareth, and her daily life was controlled by her faith. There- 
 fore I could never think of education as a mere disciplining or 
 furnishing of the intellect. To my thought, it embraced the 
 developing and ordering of the whole manhood. This was my 
 mother's doctrine, continually reiterated by my father: edu- 
 cation without religious faith and life is valueless. To my rest- 
 less, undisciplined, selfish boy-nature, all this seemed hard and 
 impracticable. To her it was easy, but it was beyond my grasp. 
 Therefore life was to me a struggle, full of divine aspirations 
 and of all too human grovelings, of promise and of failure ; and 
 I suffered much from a conscious contrast between the best I 
 dreamed of and the shabby best I did attain. False motives in 
 study hampered me. It seemed to me that I had no right to 
 gain mental power through selfish ambition. Education was my 
 idol, and yet I could not conscientiously give myself wholly 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 45 
 
 to it. In this atmosphere I was brought up, and my religious 
 reading was determined by it I read in my early boyhood 
 (before I was fifteen) the lives of Harlan Page, John and Mary 
 Fletcher, James B. Taylor, John Summerfield, John Wesley, 
 William Carvosso, Adoniram Judson, and others of this saintly 
 class. 
 
 Nature was full of wonder to me, and wielded a strange in- 
 fluence over my life. The stars, the night-winds, the thunder, 
 the clouds piled up like towers at the sunset, the ripples on the 
 bosom of the river, the dark outline of the Montour Mountain 
 in full view from my home ; all these, and everything else in 
 nature, took hold upon me, filling me with unrest and longing, 
 that grew at times into a sort of torture. Everything had relig- 
 ious relations and intimations, and my young life during these 
 earlier years was often morbid and sometimes wretched. I was 
 exceedingly ambitious to be something in the world. I had a 
 degree of faith in my ability, but eternity so impinged on the 
 present as often to make life a melancholy thing. Legitimate 
 recreation, not sufficiently encouraged by my father, seemed to 
 me frivolity ; my mother's saintliness all the while appearing as 
 necessary as it was unattainable. This chaotic religious condi- 
 tion may have been (I sometimes think it was) a necessary step in 
 my culture. I repeat the melancholy story not to condemn, but 
 to make defense of early religious education, and to enter protest 
 against the dangerous reaction of these latter days. I do not 
 regret the faithful teachings which brought me thus early face 
 to face with religious verities ; but had this discipline lacked the 
 demonstration of the pure and consistent life of my mother, it 
 would have been disastrous in the extreme. Supported as it 
 was by her living example, and by the real tenderness and in- 
 tegrity of my father, I was saved from permanent morbidness, 
 and from the reaction which often comes to a man when the 
 religious instruction of his youth has been a discipline of legal- 
 ity without love, and of dogmatism without the vitalizing and 
 winning power of personal example. 
 
 I read in those days many sermons and much theology. I 
 listened to lively discussions between Arminians and Calvinists, 
 Baptists and pedo-Baptists ; heard something of Second Advent 
 
46 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 theories, and early began to prepare for the ministry to which 
 my mother told me I had been at my birth consecrated. 
 
 In 1849 I was licensed to "exhort;" in the same year I re- 
 ceived license as a local preacher ; and in March, 1851, was ap- 
 pointed to serve as junior preacher on the Luzerne circuit in the 
 old Baltimore conference, with a senior preacher, the Eev. John 
 W. Elliot, in general charge of the circuit. In this my first year 
 of service I did some of the most faithful study of my life. I 
 was nineteen years old; college had been abandoned through the 
 pressure of church influence and of personal conscientious con- 
 viction. Whatever I did must be done alone. I rode on horse- 
 back over what was called a " four-weeks' circuit," extending 
 from White Haven to Black Creek, a distance of thirty miles. 
 Over the good roads which stretched across the mountains of this 
 coal region I would ride for hours without seeing a house or 
 meeting a traveler, and here I studied diligently. I perused my 
 professional standard, the Holy Bible; read Watson's " Institutes " 
 and Wesley's " Sermons ; " prepared sermon-outlines of my own ; 
 practiced the delivery of them on horseback among the pines ; 
 committed to memory whole pages of Campbell's " Pleasures of 
 Hope ; " read the " Divina Commedia " of Dante ; and studied every 
 page of " The Methodist Quarterly," then edited by the scholarly 
 John McClintock. I especially read and re-read the able series 
 of papers on Comte's Positive Philosophy, which appeared that 
 year in the " Quarterly." I wasted no time ; felt myself wholly un- 
 fit for the work I was engaged in ; wondered if I could somehow 
 manage to break loose from the holdings of what I believed to 
 be Providence, and go to college ; struggled day after day with 
 my ambitions ; recalled the words and looks of my mother ; re- 
 membered what my father had written me in 1849 : " I rejoice 
 that you seem to have your mind fixed upon being something. 
 Amen. Let it be something good." I had as a public speaker 
 an easy delivery, a good voice, and some pathetic power. My 
 sensible father said to me before I left home : " Do not be de- 
 ceived by the extravagant praise of weak and ignorant people, 
 and especially of foolish women in the church. Eemember how 
 little they know, and what poor judges they are of preaching. 
 Eemember that back of the pleasant manner and good voice and 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 47 
 
 correct pronunciation there must be sound thought." So, among 
 those Pennsylvania forests I would read the articles on Comte's 
 Philosophy, the book notices and editorials in the " Quarterly," 
 and compare my sermons with the strength and wealth of 
 thought, and the vigor of expression on those scholarly pages ; 
 and I often imagined John McClintock sitting behind me in the 
 pulpit while I preached. This process not only kept me "hum- 
 ble " enough, but sometimes promoted a state of self-conscious- 
 ness quite unfavorable to the most successful delivery of my 
 sermons. 
 
 I made effort after effort to bring conscience and circum- 
 stances into line with my ambition, and to break loose from the 
 active ministry in order to complete a college course. It was all 
 in vain. I finally yielded, but it was after a prolonged struggle. 
 Among my old letters I find two from my father written in 1852 ? 
 in both of which he touches upon the great source of my trouble. 
 He probes for motive. He urges me to do what seems best. 
 "Could I have my mind fully satisfied," he writes, "that your 
 aim is to glorify God in all this desire for knowledge, then I 
 would say 'press toward the mark.' But if self stands out, then 
 take care. You may become as ' sounding brass ' or ' a tinkling 
 cymbal,' with all your learning. Excuse this word of caution." 
 Later in 1852 he writes: "I notioe your argument in favor of a 
 learned ministry, but really, my son, the appeal is all labor lost 
 You are not one whit more in favor of a learned ministry than 
 your father. All he objects to is a dependence upon learning." 
 Here the father misunderstood the son, for the latter never for 
 one moment placed the slightest dependence upon intellectual 
 culture as a source of spiritual power. But it was something for 
 a young man to have the frank, loving watch-care and counsel 
 of so discreet and devoted a father. 
 
 The active ministry having been chosen, and all efforts to 
 leave it even temporarily for further educational preparation 
 having proved futile, in 1853 I joined the New Jersey Confer- 
 ence, and was appointed to my first church, at North Belleville, 
 N. J., at the same time taking up the four years' course of pre- 
 paratory study required by the Church: General history, the 
 English branches, biblical, historical, systematic, and practical 
 
48 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 theology, with written sermons and annual examinations. Un- 
 der this system in those days the candidate might by the grace 
 of sympathetic examiners pass the examinations with compara- 
 tive ease ; but the man ambitious to do faithful work found such 
 work possible, and from the beginning to the end of my four 
 years' course I studied diligently, coveting the most rigid annual 
 examinations that I might have the largest measure of self-respect 
 as a student, and prove to myself at least, what I might have 
 done had the four years' college course been granted. 
 
 During my early ministerial life I conceived a plan reaching 
 through the years by which, in connection with professional 
 duties, I might turn my whole life into a college course, and by 
 force of personal resolve secure many benefits of college educa- 
 tion. I remembered that the college aims to promote, through 
 force of personal resolve, the systematic training of all the mental 
 faculties, to the habit of concentrated and continuous attention, 
 that the mind with its varied energies may be trained and thus 
 prepared to do its best work, subject to the direction of the will ; 
 that it cultivates the powers of oral and written expression ; that 
 it encourages fellowships and competitions among students seek- 
 ing the same end ; that it secures the influence of professional 
 specialists — great teachers who know how to inspire and to 
 quicken other minds ; and that it gives to a man broad surveys 
 of the fields of learning, discovering relations, indicating the 
 lines of special research for those whose peculiar aptitudes are 
 developed by college discipline ; thus giving one a sense of his 
 own littleness in the presence of the vast realm of truth exposed 
 to view, so that he may find out with La Place that " what we 
 know here is very little; what we are ignorant of is immense." 
 
 The task before me was to secure these results to as large a 
 degree as possible: mental discipline in order to intellectual 
 achievement, practice in expression, contact with living stu- 
 dents and living teachers, and the broad outlook which the col- 
 lege curriculum guarantees. This aim, therefore, for years con- 
 trolled my professional and non-professional studies. It was 
 constantly present in sermonizing, in teaching, in general reading, 
 in pastoral visitation, in contact deliberately sought with the 
 ablest men and women — specialists, scientists, litterateurs, whom 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 49 
 
 I could find, especially those who had gone through college or 
 who had taught in college. I secured from time to time special 
 teachers in Greek, in Hebrew, in French, in physical science, 
 giving what time I could to preparation and recitation. I read 
 with care translations of Homer and Yirgil, outlines of the lead- 
 ing Greek and Latin classics, and in connection with an exceed- 
 ingly busy professional life, devoted much time to popular read- 
 ings in science and English literature. When thirty years old I 
 went abroad, and spent a year chiefly for the sake of coming into 
 personal contact with the Old "World of history and literature, 
 and found double pleasure in the pilgrimage because I made it a 
 part of ray college training. In Egypt and Palestine, in Greece 
 and Italy, I felt the spell of the old sages, writers, artists, and 
 was glad to find that the readings of my youth and of my later 
 manhood greatly helped me to appreciate the regions I visited 
 and the remains in art and architecture which I was permitted 
 to study. 
 
 This meager and somewhat morbid story of a half century of 
 schooling has been told with perfect frankness. Since the strug- 
 gles of those early years peace has come. The old and appa- 
 rently irreconcilable conflict between studies secular and sacred 
 has ceased. Life is no longer filled with insatiable longings. I 
 am at school now as a student, every day ; and unfinished cur- 
 ricula reach out into undefined futures. I shall never " finish " 
 my education. 
 
FIFTH PAPER. 
 By PROFESSOR WILLIAM T. HARRIS. 
 
 I SEE that my predecessors Lave succeeded in discovering 
 pretty or ingenious devices under which they have shielded 
 themselves from the implied egotism of posing on this rostrum 
 in the attitude of eminent examples, or at least representative 
 types, of educated men. I, too, have felt very keenly the need 
 of such protection, but am in the end obliged to confess that all 
 my efforts have failed to invent any covering of sufficient thick- 
 ness and density to serve my purpose. There is no course left, 
 accordingly, but to accept, submissively, the consequences of my 
 rashness. 
 
 My early life was passed on a farm — I should say about 
 sixteen years of it. It was a farm in the north-east part of 
 Connecticut, practically shut in by woods, and distant a mile 
 from the nearest neighbors. But the farm was large and my 
 grandfather employed many laborers, so that we formed a small 
 colony by ourselves. 
 
 At the age of four years I commenced attending the district 
 school in the traditional " red school-house," a mile and a half 
 distant on one of the roads through the woods. My aunt was 
 the instructress for that summer. I suppose that I learned to 
 read a little, but have no recollection of anything except my 
 interest in the older boys and girls whom I saw there. Coming 
 as I did from the secluded life on the farm, with no playmates 
 or young people that I was permitted to associate with, it was a 
 great event to find playmates. I can remember that by the fol- 
 lowing summer I had already learned to read. I read and re- 
 read the pieces in the text-book of my own accord at home until 
 I quite mastered them. On the third summer I was set to study- 
 ing a large geography. Our new teacher was considered excel- 
 lent among the farmer people, because she was " strict " and 
 could "beat knowledge into the heads of her pupils." One 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 51 
 
 lesson in that large geography (Roswell Smith's, of Hartford) 
 I well remember, because the entire class failed to learn the 
 answer to the question, " What is a city ? " No wonder ; we 
 were thirty miles from the nearest city, and never had seen 
 one. We could not describe a city from our own knowledge, 
 nor could we comprehend the answer printed in the book. 
 That answer, as near as I can recall it, was this : " A city is 
 a large town containing many inhabitants, incorporated with 
 peculiar privileges, and governed by a mayor, aldermen, and 
 other officers." We were told to remain after the close of school 
 in the afternoon and learn that mysterious definition ! I was 
 much grieved at the punishment, and was allowed to go home 
 as soon as I had repeated the words after the teacher, sobbing as 
 I did so. As a rule, I was well behaved at school and very rarely 
 received punishment. This "strict" teacher, however, struck 
 me once on the hand with a ferule.* An older boy sitting 
 near by had seen me absorbed in my book, and wishing diversion 
 had suddenly thrust a pin into my side. I only winced, but he 
 laughed or " snickered." The teacher looked up and said : 
 " Who did that ? " " Simeon pricked me," I replied. The teacher 
 made no further inquiries, but punished us both, not severely, 
 with the ferule. I deserved my part of it for tale-bearing, per- 
 haps ; but that teacher did not knowingly punish for mere tale- 
 bearing ; she encouraged it, rather. 
 
 After I had learned how to read I began to put my knowledge 
 to use. Finding an old Latin grammar about the house, prob- 
 ably a stray volume from the library of my great-grandfather 
 Wilkinson, a physician, I committed to memory a long list of 
 
 *A flat piece of wood called also a " ruler," and not the giant fennel plant 
 used by the Romans in flogging school -boys and slaves, and by some lexicog- 
 raphers supposed to be called ferula because from ferire, to strike. It is sin- 
 gular that this same giant fennel, called vdpQr/E, by the Greeks, was used by 
 Prometheus in preserving the stolen fire by means of its tinderdike pith. Alex- 
 ander carried with him Aristotle's critical edition of Homer in the hollow of the 
 same plant, thus preserving the same sort of fire, perhaps, that Prometheus 
 stole. As the Greek school-master also made use of this plant on his dull and 
 obstinate pupils, the question arises as to the poetic symbolism : was Prometh- 
 eus, perhaps, a flogging school -master, kindling divine fire in his pupils with the 
 ferule? We know that Aristotle was Alexander's school-master. But I leave 
 this interesting question to the skillful archaeologists. 
 
52 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 Latin phrases and sentences, with their translations. On a visit 
 in my sixth year at my paternal grandfather's in Ehode Island, 
 I attracted the attention and commendation of my aunts and 
 uncles by repeating what I had learned. 
 
 When I had reached my eighth year I attended also the 
 winter session of school. As is well known, the Connecticut 
 schools drew most of the money for their support from the pro- 
 ceeds of the State school fund. A twelve- week session in the 
 summer taught by a woman (the " school-ma'am," as she was 
 called), and a three-month session in the winter taught by a 
 " school-master," constituted the entire school year, some twenty- 
 five full weeks all told. There was no continuity of instruction, 
 very rarely the same person teaching two consecutive sessions of 
 school, and little or no supervision as regards studies on the 
 part of the school committee or the parish board of examiners. 
 There was no fixed course of study except so far as tradi- 
 tion had settled it. The "three R's" held their place. We 
 still used goose-quills, which required frequent mending by 
 the teacher. He wrote the copies also at the top of the page. 
 Steel pens began to be used soon after that time. At the begin- 
 ning of tbe school term all pupils were made to commence with 
 the first lesson in their books, no matter how many years 
 they had already devoted to the study of them. This, of 
 course, had its merit, as an annual review tended to produce 
 thoroughness. In case, however, the teacher attempted clas- 
 sification, the maturer pupils were kept back for the sake of 
 those just beginning, and, not being required to study again 
 what was already familiar, fell into lax and listless habits. But 
 classification was not much attempted. In a school of twenty or 
 thirty pupils there were perhaps as many as forty-five "reci- 
 tations " * each day. In most classes (Eng. " Form ") there 
 were only two or three pupils, and in many only one. The 
 teacher had five and sometimes ten minutes to devote to each 
 lesson, and of course could not draw out the reflective powers 
 of the pupil by discussion and analysis. Everything drifted to 
 mere memoriter lessons where such were possible. Even in the 
 
 * American word for class exercise, i. e., repetition or rehearsal of lesson by 
 the pupil to the teacher for criticism and examination. 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 53 
 
 most mechanically conducted school, much exercise of thought 
 on the part of the pupil is demanded, especially in mathematics. 
 A bright pupil always does his own reflection, moreover, in 
 spite of school methods. He finds interesting matter for thought 
 in all his studies, for the traditional studies of the elementary 
 school open the doors to the solid intellectual acquisition of the 
 entire human race. 
 
 On the whole, the chief text-book in the school was Noah 
 Webster's " Elementary Spelling Book ; " the same book that is 
 still published and sold at the rate of twelve hundred thousand 
 copies per annum, being the most generally used of all school 
 text-books. This work was learned in my school days from 
 cover to cover. Its author possessed a remarkable power of 
 logical definition, being as careful as Aristotle to include always 
 the " proximate genus and the characteristic difference " in de- 
 fining any word. But his power of popular exposition was 
 otherwise very small, and hence his sentences were not clear and 
 intelligible to immature minds, although admirable to the skilled 
 thinker. I have already quoted the definition of "city" from 
 my geography, obviously enough modeled on the Aristotelian 
 form of definition. Here are two specimens from the introduc- 
 tion to the spelling-book : " Language or speech is the utterance 
 of articulate sounds or voices, rendered significant by usage, for 
 the expression and communication of thoughts." " Accent is a 
 forcible stress or impulse of voice on a letter or syllable, dis- 
 tinguishing it from others in the same word." I never heard a 
 teacher once attempt to explain these sentences, or even question 
 a pupil on their meaning. But all pupils, young and old, were 
 required superstitiously to memorize and repeat them, year after 
 year, exactly as they were printed. The short pithy sentences 
 placed after the spelling lessons contain a store of wisdom, and 
 as this book was used for a first reading-book and primer, its 
 influence was on the whole great and salutary. 
 
 When I was twelve years old, we happened to have a school- 
 master of more qualifications than usual. He knew a smatter- 
 ing of Latin and Spanish. One day I took with me to school 
 the old Latin grammar that I had amused myself with six years 
 before. Noticing it as he passed my desk, the master said: 
 
54 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 " That's right ; " and picking up the book proceeded, much to my 
 surprise, to assign me a lesson to learn — the paradigm Penna. 
 From that day I studied Latin. My teacher hunted up an old 
 copy of " Andrews' Latin Reader," and with a most superficial 
 knowledge of inflections I began to translate "iEsop's Fables." 
 Some two years before this, at nine, I had taken English gram- 
 mar, in Roswell Smith's text-book, and in one winter had pretty 
 well mastered it. It was always a delightful study to me. 
 " Parsing," as it was called, is a logical exercise, practicing the 
 mind on definitions and classification. As my ancestry on my 
 mother's side included clergymen in its two chief branches, and 
 as my great grandfather on my father's side was a metaphysician 
 as well as physician and surgeon, I suppose it possible that I 
 had some inherited aptitude for abstract studies, which accounts 
 for my great delight in grammar while a youth, and for a still 
 keener relish for philosophic studies in later life. I seemed to 
 find an intellectual food in these things which perfectly satisfied 
 a gnawing hunger. 
 
 Among the studies of the district school, I must place before 
 all, in value, the reading-book. We used "The National Pre- 
 ceptor" (not "The American Preceptor," which was ah older 
 book). This was one of the several excellent collections made by 
 the Rev John Pierpont. In the old-fashioned country school, the 
 children generally learned to read by means of the spelling-book, 
 and then took up the same reading-book with the highest class, 
 though they sometimes used an intermediate reader. Although 
 this practice brought together the best readers and the poorest, 
 and forced all to read much that was beyond the depth of the 
 most intelligent pupils, yet there was the very great advantage 
 that the whole school read and assisted in reading every year 
 the finest gems of thought and expression in the language. I 
 cannot but regard the practice of the country school as, on the 
 whole, vastly more beneficial than that of the modern graded 
 city sehool, which allows the majority of its pupils to leave 
 school without ever reading, or even hearing read, the fine prose 
 and poetry of the highest readers. The genius of a great author 
 will far more than conpensate for his difficulties. The pupil 
 will do.ubttless fail to understand even one-half of what he reads, 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 55 
 
 but tlie fraction that he does understand will be worth far more 
 than the weak colloquial English pieces that fill the lower 
 readers. It is very hard to make otherwise enlightened educa- 
 tors see the fact that there is no gain in substituting for a valua- 
 ble work, which is so difficult that it cannot be understood, a 
 work which contains little or nothing worth understanding. 
 
 From my eighth to my tenth year I spent several terms in 
 the city schools of Providence, Ehode Island. There I found 
 what Mr. Hale calls the "martinet " system. Much more pains 
 was expended in causing pupils to mark time with precision than 
 in marching forward toward any definite object. I came to detest 
 city schools very bitterly, because I loved individual freedom 
 and hated mere forms as such. I desired to come at the sub- 
 stance of the study, and grudged the time which seemed to me 
 wasted over the mechanism of it. For a long time, we were 
 required to commit to memory the questions of our catechetical 
 geography, and repeat them word for word in their exact order, 
 as the " analysis " of the lesson. Little or no time was spent on 
 the answers to the questions, and there was no discussion what- 
 ever of the real subject. Moreover, there was frequent corporal 
 punishment, and sometimes it reached a degree of cruelty that I 
 shudder to remember. The high school of that city imposed on 
 the grammar schools a severe standard of preparation in those 
 studies that were required for admission. This kept back the 
 pupils of the classes in the lower schools in order to make them 
 more "thorough," as it is called. The direct result of this was 
 the " marking time " system, in which mechanical memory was 
 almost the only faculty required or much cultivated. I mention 
 this here because I have seen very often, in my experience with 
 school systems, East and "West, the same difficulty. A too high 
 standard of admission to the high schools is sure to turn the 
 grammar schools into cramming factories on a large scale. In 
 order to make sure of passing her pupils into the next grade, the 
 teacher is compelled to rely on the mechanical elements of in- 
 struction, because she can manage to control these, and these 
 alone. 
 
 While I have never revised my judgment in regard to the 
 intellectual results of the martinet system of instruction, I 
 
56 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 have very materially modified my opinion of its strict discipline. 
 The great object of all education is to fit the individual to com- 
 bine with his fellow-men. His intellectual training should 
 enable him to master the arts of intercommunication and give 
 him the conventional view of the world. Each individual must 
 be taught how his fellow-citizens look at things and events, or 
 else he cannot understand their actions nor direct his own to any 
 good purpose. It is still more important that the individual ac- 
 quire the necessary practical habits. He must learn how to work 
 in company, and for this purpose there are required certain semi- 
 mechanical moral virtues, such as regularity, punctuality, and 
 self-restraint, in whatever will encroach on the province of one's 
 neighbor — just such virtues as strict school discipline teaches to 
 perfection. Concerted action at the word of command, strict 
 obedience, perfect military discipline, are qualities that are of 
 special use in our modern urban civilization, in which the rail- 
 road, the telegraph, and machinery in general play so great a 
 role. But the mechanical phase of morals, if cultivated exclu- 
 sively, and so as to dwarf the intellectual side of education, which 
 demands above all things spontaneity and free insight, will fall 
 sadly short of meeting the modern requirements. I have no 
 doubt that the martinet system fails sadly on the intellectual 
 side of its training. But the reaction against it goes too far. 
 
 Connected with my school education in the public schools 
 after the age of thirteen was a series of terms at boarding schools, 
 one each year. I attended various New England academies, say 
 one term each at five different academies. The most noteworthy 
 intellectual acquisition that I made during the first of these terms 
 was a knowledge of natural philosophy. I did not take it up as 
 a regular study, but borrowing a text-book of one of my school- 
 mates, I read it under my desk in school hours after hastily learn- 
 ing my other lessons. This book specially interested me in hy- 
 draulics, and I made force-pumps and fire-engines on a small scale. 
 At my second academy perhaps the most important influence was 
 Milton's " Paradise Lost," which we used as a book for studies in 
 syntax. I was entranced with its sublime poetic form, and 
 eagerly studied its view of the world, Calvinist as I was by 
 family and church education. In the third academy, being then 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 57 
 
 at the age of fifteen, I began Greek grammar. A year before 
 this I had become greatly interested in Edward Daniel Clarke's 
 " Travels through Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land," one of his 
 six volumes being in our small home library. I was excited by 
 his descriptions of Greece and Asia Minor, and a curious desire 
 possessed me to read, or at least to pronounce, the Greek quota- 
 tions contained in the book. I took Webster's octavo Diction- 
 ary, that gave a few derivations of words from the Greek, and 
 by careful comparison made out the value of each letter in the 
 Greek alphabet, and, as I afterward learned, correctly, according 
 to the English method of pronunciation. 
 
 I was beginning to be interested in astronomy, and purchas- 
 ing of a spectacle-maker two lenses, of focuses respectively, one 
 and thirty inches, I fixed them in a tin tube and commenced 
 observations on various objects, terrestrial and celestial. I made 
 or put together afterward several achromatic telescopes of small 
 size, buying the lenses and mounting them in cheap tubes of my 
 own contrivance. 
 
 On my fifth term away, at seventeen, I entered the Phil- 
 lips Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts, then under the prin- 
 cipalship of Dr. S. H. Taylor. I had never before met a 
 disciplinary force that swept me completely off my feet and 
 overcame my capricious will. My intellectual work had been 
 all hap-hazard, a matter of mere inclination. I now began to 
 hear a great deal about mental discipline and to see manly in- 
 dustry. I took myself to studying in earnest, and tried to see 
 how many hours of persistent industry I could accomplish each 
 day. In my short stay at Andover I gained more than at any 
 other school, and have always highly revered its discipline and 
 instruction. 
 
 I taught school in the country for two winter sessions, after 
 my third and fifth academical terms respectively. I used my 
 winter evenings in study. During the first winter, at the age 
 of sixteen years, I mastered geometry and trigonometry. The 
 second winter I devoted entirely to Locke's " Essay on the Human 
 Understanding," having read somewhere that Franklin prided 
 himself on reading that work at my age. At first it was incom- 
 parably dull reading, but bringing into requisition the " disci- 
 
58 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 pline of mind " that I had acquired at Andover, I soon became 
 really interested in Locke's refutation of innate ideas. When, 
 three years afterward, I came to read Cousin's criticism of Locke, 
 I took fire in every part of my soul, from the intense interest 
 aroused in me at seeing the positions established by Locke with 
 so much tedious iteration overthrown by brilliant and over- 
 whelming arguments based on keen psychological distinctions. 
 
 My study of Latin and Greek had occupied four terms, one 
 each year at some academy, but I had used much time in review- 
 ing those studies when at home working on the farm. 
 
 In the fall of 1854 I entered Yale College. My term at 
 Andover had taught me how to work patiently and ploddingly. 
 At Yalo, I learned how to perform a large task in a brief time. 
 There was a written examination at the close of each term for 
 which preparation must be made by private reviews. To be able 
 to go over one's entire work for the term in two or three days of 
 study, brought into discipline a new power, usually called the 
 power to " cram." Of all my school disciplines I have found this 
 one the most useful. The ability to throw one's self upon a dif- 
 ficulty with several times his ordinary working power is required 
 again and again in practical life on meeting any considerable 
 obstacles. 
 
 My study of mathematics at college was rendered of no ac- 
 count by the fact that I had gone over and comprehended the 
 entire geometry and trigonometry by myself two years previous 
 to entering, and thus the freshness and keen zest of first learning 
 was dulled, and I fell into lax habits of study in mathematics 
 which I did not afterward correct. At Andover, I had begun 
 to read Humboldt's " Cosmos," and grew to be deeply interested 
 in natural science. I began to disparage the study of Latin and 
 Greek as dead languages. Language itself was " only an artificial 
 product of the human mind." I wished to know nature. This 
 thought came to possess me more and more until it finally over- 
 mastered me. About the middle of the junior year I withdrew 
 from my connection with the college, full of dissatisfaction with 
 its course of study, and impatient for the three "moderns" — 
 modern science, modern literature, and modern history. 
 
 Soon after this I discovered that my slender knowledge of 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 59 
 
 Latin and Greek was my chief instrument in the acquirement of 
 new ideas. I found that the words in the English language 
 which are used in the expression and communication of general 
 ideas are derived almost entirely from the classic languages. 
 Knowing the literal meaning of the roots, I was able to get the 
 full force of the English vocabulary used for science and real 
 thought. Some years afterward, too, I came upon a more im- 
 portant insight. I saw that our entire modern civilization is 
 derivative, resting on the Greek for its aesthetic and scientific 
 forms, and on the Eoman for the forms of its political and 
 legal life. The frame-work of civilization being thus borrowed, 
 modern culture has likewise to learn to know itself by studying, 
 so to speak, its embryology in Latin and Greek. In our schools 
 we put on for awhile the spiritual clothing of the Greeks and 
 Eomans and look out upon the world through their eyes. By so 
 doing we acquire an ability, not otherwise attainable, of analyz- 
 ing and comprehending our own civilization. 
 
 Here I close my record, although it seems to me that my real 
 education began later in life. All that I have here described 
 belongs, as it were, to a sort of antemundane soul-wandering. 
 
SIXTH PAPEE. 
 By PRESIDENT S. C. BARTLETT. 
 
 It is with some hesitation that I accede to the editor's request 
 that I would tell, in a manner " frankly personal," how I was 
 educated. But, having often expressed the wish that the young 
 might profit more by the experience of their seniors, I will pro- 
 ceed with the narrative, in the hope that it may not be without 
 benefit to some one. 
 
 My parents were determined to give to their children far bet- 
 ter advantages than they themselves had possessed They were, 
 both of them, persons of sterling moral worth, great force of 
 character, and strong native powers. On the death of my 
 grandfather, the earliest settled physician of Salisbury, N. EL 
 my father had been thrown forth, at the age of nineteen, to 
 make his own way in the world. By a rare union of integrity, 
 energy, skill, prudence, and executive ability, he early placed 
 himself, and always remained, in easy circumstances as a coun- 
 try trader. He died at the age of eighty-seven, widely and 
 deeply respected for all the qualities of a noble manhood. My 
 education began in his influence and example, on which I would 
 gladly say more. It is relevant to my purpose to mention that 
 though largely self-taught himself, he aided two of his younger 
 brothers through college, and determined to give each of his five 
 sons a college education. Three of us accepted the offer. My 
 mother was in her sphere fully the equal of my father, and my 
 admiration for both of them deepens with my advancing years. 
 I have no distinct recollection of a time when I could not read. 
 I remember my mother's promising me that as soon as I should 
 have read through the Bible I should have a present of the 
 book ; and I still possess the copy, with my name written by my 
 father when I was eight years old. The reading must have been 
 perfunctory, but it was done after a sort. 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 61 
 
 My parents proceeded from the outset on the principle that 
 nothing should interfere with my studies. In the days of my 
 childhood, however, six hours a day well spent in the school 
 were wisely considered enough of study for that period of 
 growth and immaturity. Out of school hours and on the Satur- 
 day half-holidays, I got my exercise and health as naturally as 
 a colt does. We had our ball games of various kinds, quoits, 
 wrestling, skating, running, riding, and a good deal of general 
 rough-and-tumble, giving me once a dislocated elbow, many hard 
 knocks, some narrow escapes, but abundant health and consti- 
 tution for a life of work. 
 
 I early derived great benefit from the general influence of 
 the place. Salisbury was then somewhat noted among country 
 towns for its intelligence, its social life, and the number of its 
 college students. Here was an old academy, now extinct, with 
 a small endowment, taught by a series of men like Judge 
 Eichard Fletcher and Professor Nathaniel H. Carter ; and a place 
 of training for many prominent men, among whom were Ezekiel 
 Webster, William P. Fessenden, John A. Dix, and Ichabod Bart- 
 lett. The public or "district" school was taught in winter 
 largely by students of Dartmouth College, and in summer by 
 young women of the best education that the times afforded. 
 These were quickening influences felt through the whole com- 
 munity. 
 
 Vulgarisms and slang were resolutely excluded from my 
 father's house, and my parents, though limited in their early 
 education, were almost wholly free from the supposed New Eng- 
 land provincialisms. I did not hear from them, nor often from 
 others, the clipped participle (in' for ing) nor the Yankee eou ; 
 and I may say that the provincialisms of language and pronun- 
 ciation which the story-tellers have so lavishly ascribed to New 
 Englanders, does not, so far as my observation goes, belong to 
 the classes to whom it is often imputed. It is caricature and not 
 portraiture of those classes. Indeed, much of it cannot be found 
 anywhere, except by laborious research. A very large part of 
 the peculiarities of the Biglow papers is unknown to me, except 
 as I have read it in these and similar productions, although many 
 of the words and idioms could have been found among the most 
 
62 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 illiterate, and probably all of them somewhere. In the large 
 district school that I first attended, the children of the whole 
 village were carefully and correctly taught. I attended this 
 district school in winter till I was about twelve years old, leav- 
 ing it in summer for the academy some three years earlier. 
 The district school grounded me well in the primary branches. 
 The grammar teaching alone was mechanical; the rest was 
 thorough. The important branch of spelling seems to me to 
 have received more effectual attention then, in the schools gen- 
 erally, than at the present time. Since I was twelve years 
 old I have seldom had to correct my spelling of any word 
 that I have had occasion to use. I deem it an important 
 point. 
 
 My father's book-case contained some valuable books, the most 
 stimulating of which was Boswell's "Johnson." I got a good 
 deal out of " The Analectic Magazine," pored over Gregory's " Dic- 
 tionary of the Arts and Sciences," made my way through Scott's 
 " Life of Napoleon," and devoured " The Scottish Chiefs " and 
 " Thaddeus of Warsaw " at so early an age that I supposed them 
 as veritable history as Scott's " Napoleon." The village library 
 extended my reading to " Don Quixote," Cook's " Voyages," and 
 other books which made less impression, including a taste of " The 
 Spectator." My mother's two younger sisters, highly educated 
 for their day, and associate teachers with Miss Grant and Miss 
 Lyon, helped me somewhat in their vacations by making me read 
 to them aloud. I thus made my first acquaintance with " The 
 Lady of the Lake." It was a thoughtful thing in them. 
 
 About the age of nine I began in summer to attend the acad- 
 emy, getting the benefit of a walk of a mile and three-quarters 
 each way. I began at once the study of Latin. I had the good 
 fortune to be thoroughly drilled in all the forms of the language 
 and the principles of syntax, but without the necessity of 
 memorizing all that wearisome mass of subordinate statements 
 and technicalities into which it afterward became the custom to 
 shred away the underlying principles, conceal the genius of the 
 language, and extinguish the best uses of classical study. One 
 of the most valuable of my lessons I received in my second sum- 
 mer at the academy, under a new preceptor, when, after hearing 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 63 
 
 me recite five minutes, he shut the book with a slap that made 
 my cheeks burn, and sent me to my seat to try again. It was 
 my first and last experience of the kind, and I shall always re- 
 member with gratitude the name of John J. Sanborn, the teacher 
 who did it. He had also a way of occasionally reading aloud 
 a short passage of poetry, and ascertaining how much of it we 
 could repeat from a single hearing. I have wished that more en- 
 couragement to memorize choice literature had been given in the 
 course of my training. I early learned in the Sunday school to 
 commit large portions of Scripture ; but none of my teachers 
 suggested the desirableness of committing choice passages of 
 prose or poetry, except for the purpose of declamation. It was 
 a great oversight. 
 
 After two summers at the Salisbury Academy, my experience 
 was enlarged by a transfer to the academy at Boscawen, which 
 was then in a more flourishing condition. Here I began upon the 
 Greek, and received a strong intellectual impetus from the per- 
 sonal influence of the principal, Jarvis Gregg, afterward Professor 
 Gregg, who died too early to make the mark which he was sure 
 to have made had he lived. His intellectual activity, wide read- 
 ing, refined taste, social turn, and lively interest in young men, 
 left a deeper impress on many of those under his instruction than 
 probably he ever imagined. The quickening influence of such 
 men is of incalculable value. 
 
 The following winter a very different experience awaited me. 
 I was placed under the private tuition of a young clergyman not 
 properly qualified for the duty. The time, however, was not 
 wholly lost. My brother and I, his two pupils, soon discov- 
 ered his deficiency, and I think we studied all the harder to 
 catch him tripping. We sometimes specially prepared ourselves 
 with questions of construction or syntax, in order to watch his 
 puzzled face as he vainly scratched his head, and to enjoy his 
 look of relief as we cautiously helped him out Though he lived 
 to a green old age, I think he never quite understood the case. 
 Certainly he always remembered us as good boys and his good 
 pupils. 
 
 Two years of steady work at Pinkerton Academy, Deny, 
 N. H., then one of the best fitting-schools in New England, com- 
 
64 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 pleted my preparation for college. Mr. Abel F. Hildreth, the 
 principal, was proud of the number and quality of the young men 
 he had fitted for various New England colleges. I recall nothing 
 of special note, however, except the delicate mode in which Mr. 
 Hildreth once stimulated me to better methods, by putting into 
 my hands, without saying a word, a translation from Homer 
 written by his former pupil, Samuel H. Taylor, admirable alike 
 for its mechanical execution and its careful renderings. I under- 
 stood the hint. 
 
 I was ready for college before I was fifteen years old. I was 
 too young ; but it was a perplexing question what to do with 
 me, and so I entered. I had studied as much mathematics as 
 is now required by New England colleges, and had read more 
 Latin and Greek than is now called for — differently, to be sure, 
 but not of necessity unprofitably. The age of excessive techni- 
 calities had not arrived, nor the age of random acquisition by the 
 student. But there certainly was a robust scholarship and vigor- 
 ous mental training which would seem to have made as clear 
 and sound reasoners, as forceful thinkers, and as strong profes- 
 sional men as have been formed since. Improvements have been 
 and will be made in those methods ; but the last word has not 
 yet been said on the subject of liberal education. 
 
 My youth in college might have operated more to my dis- 
 advantage than it actually did. In some studies I could have 
 profited more had I been older. But at a given age later I was 
 quite as well able to grapple with them as if I had entered 
 college older. It actually brought me earlier to my life-work. 
 There was the customary and grave danger with very young 
 students of being led astray. My safeguard in college was the 
 habit of diligent application to work and to duty, in which I 
 had been thoroughly trained. Let what would happen, I got 
 my lessons. At the same time, throughout my college course I 
 studied on, so far as I can remember, without a particle of what 
 is commonly called ambition. It was a complete surprise to me 
 to be told, at the end of freshman year, that my rank was 
 first. My nearest rival, whom I slightly outranked to the end 
 of the course, was, then and always, one of my best friends. It 
 was the late admirable Dr. E. R Peaslee. He had a poorer 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 65 
 
 preparation and more delicate health than I, though some years 
 my senior. In some of the later studies his age gave him the 
 advantage. I remember, as an incident of our college life, that 
 when Doctor Lord, the president, urged upon the students his 
 favorite scheme of abolishing all appointments founded on 
 scholarship, I was one of only two men in my class that voted 
 against the scheme. 
 
 In my freshman year I committed the mistake of devoting 
 all my leisure to novel-reading, influenced by the suggestion of 
 a senior, whom I then regarded with more veneration than since. 
 I now advise college boys to let their reading center largely 
 around their studies, thus strengthening both reading and study. 
 Of the several portions of my college work, there was one that 
 I remember as peculiarly profitable. It was under the accom- 
 plished Professor Haddock. He had us read portions of Quin- 
 tilian and of Tacitus as a rhetorical exercise. He was an ex- 
 cellent Latin scholar, and had a singularly pure English style. 
 He required us first to translate, and then to defend our transla- 
 tion at all points. It must be not only exact rendering, but idio- 
 matic English. Synonymous words were thus passed in review ; 
 and the whole process became an admirable training alike in 
 the accurate use of language and the nicest discrimination of 
 thought. It exhibited one of the capabilities of classic study. 
 I have seen the experiment tried with a college class in " De- 
 mosthenes on the Crown," on a still broader and higher range, 
 including the subject-matter, and with admirable effect. 
 
 After graduation, my education still went on, while I was 
 myself an educator. I was offered the principalship of a coun- 
 try grammar school in Yermont Conscious of immaturity, I 
 worked harder than ever to be well up in the studies I had to 
 teach. Among other things, I was to give experimental lectures 
 on chemistry, of which we had had a mere smattering in college. 
 I worked it up till I had mastered the chemistry of that day, and 
 gave, as I thought, a more satisfactory course of lectures than I had 
 heard. Of course, I ran some risks and had some narrow escapes 
 in my experiments, and not seldom toiled at my task till mid- 
 night and far beyond. I also entered on a course of historical 
 reading, imposing on myself the condition of giving a full oral 
 
66 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 statement of the contents of each chapter before entering upon 
 the next. These were two profitable years. And I should 
 mention, in passing, that I had taught two short winter schools 
 while I was in college, and had endeavored to turn the time to 
 account somewhat in the same way, utilizing my college studies 
 both for the benefit of my schools and myself. One other in- 
 fluence was of great value to me while principal of the gram- 
 mar school. I was put forward to be superintendent of the 
 Sunday school, frequently to take charge of social religious 
 meetings, to make temperance addresses, and the like. I made 
 it a point never to shrink from any such duty for which good 
 judges thought me fitted and to which I was called ; and though 
 conscious of short-comings, I found it a valuable part of my 
 training. 
 
 At the age of twenty I was invited to a tutorship in Dart- 
 mouth College. Here, besides the laborious effort at perfect 
 preparation of the lessons, I gave my leisure to metaphysical 
 studies, Cousin's influence being then predominant. At this 
 time I more fully learned the art of independent investigation. 
 In my vacation I studied Italian by myself, and read most of 
 Tasso. 
 
 From the college tutorship I went to Andover Theological 
 Seminary, where I found the enthusiasm of Professors Stuart, 
 Park, and B. B. Edwards peculiarly stimulating. So also were the 
 companionship and keen discussions, public and private, of my 
 student associates, among whom were several men of eminent 
 ability. At this time the writings of Carlyle and Coleridge were 
 making a deep impression upon thoughtful young men; and 
 while I did not adopt all their opinions, I acknowledge a great 
 indebtedness to them at that stage of my studies. But one of 
 the most powerfully educating influences to which I was ever 
 subjected came from Professor Park, then in the chair of sacred 
 rhetoric. The exercises under him in the construction and criti- 
 cism of plans and sermons, the sharp discriminations, careful 
 analyses, and sometimes complete demolition of a discourse, fol- 
 lowed by a masterly reconstruction of the whole theme by the 
 professor, gave me a discipline and an idea of the true functions 
 of rhetoric — as not merely negative and repressive, but develop- 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 67 
 
 ing and constructive — which I wish could be universally realized, 
 but which, alas, almost never is. 
 
 In the theological seminary I extended my studies beyond 
 the range of the prescribed course, into Greek philosophy. And 
 I may add that, after entering the ministry, I made it a point 
 regularly to maintain, as far as possible, the habits and studies 
 of the seminary. The result of my training, nearly up to the 
 time of my professional life, had been such a balancing of intel- 
 lectual work that I could have entered with nearly equal facility 
 on any one of several courses of life — four or five of which had 
 been proposed to me by different advisers. After two and a half 
 years in pastoral work, I was called to the chair of Intellect- 
 ual Philosophy in Western Eeserve College, where I continued 
 my education by a large amount of collateral study, seldom ter- 
 minating till late at night. And my observation and experience 
 lead me to regard some professional training and some amount of 
 professional practice as an almost indispensable preliminary to 
 a college professorship, to broaden the mind and sphere of the 
 professor, and prevent the narrowness of thought, method, and 
 range, which is so apt to characterize the pedagogue. When, at 
 a later period, I was constrained to occupy a chair in a theological 
 seminary, it was owing to the studies I had maintained and 
 prosecuted throughout my professional life. 
 
 I have thus briefly stated all that occurs to me as likely to 
 be of use to others, in regard to the process of my education. 
 As I look back upon the history, in addition to the suggestions 
 that might naturally occur, two or three impressions remain 
 profoundly fixed in my mind. One is, that, with whatever 
 opportunities, all higher education is essentially self-education. 
 Teachers do not make the scholar. The impulse comes chiefly 
 from within ; and the student becomes the scholar when he 
 ceases to confine himself to prescribed tasks or previous limits, 
 and spontaneously reaches out beyond. Another strong impres- 
 sion made upon me is, that the best preliminary preparation for 
 even the studies of a specialist is a liberal education. Such an 
 education connects him with the wide circle of thought and 
 knowledge, and saves him from narrowness and hobbies. The 
 man who can do one thing best is usually a man who could 
 
68 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 have done other things well. It has also been my observation 
 that such a liberal education as will fit the man in due time to 
 grapple most effectually with any specialty, consists more in 
 training than in acquisition. The man that is thoroughly master 
 of his own powers will master any sphere or theme to which he 
 is called. 
 
SEVENTH PAPER. 
 By PRESIDENT J. R. KENDRICK. 
 
 To avoid fatalistic conclusions and the slimy pit of ma- 
 terialism, we need not deny the plain facts of heredity and 
 environment. My education began in the cradle, and back of 
 it. Though my father died when I was but three years old, and 
 his name has been with me little more than a vague tradition, I 
 can now see how largely he determined my individuality and 
 history, even more, perhaps, than did my mother. 
 
 These parents were of the God-fearing New England stock, 
 mingling in their veins the blood of various old Puritan families, 
 such as the Davenports, Griswolds and Edwardses. In their 
 revolt from "the standing order," a revolt in which they became 
 Baptists and Democrats, their Puritanic sternness was, I fancy, a 
 good deal softened and liberalized. My father's church, organ- 
 ized under his own ministry, and of which he remained pastor 
 for a quarter of a century, until his death, was a kind of cave of 
 Adullam, in which the more restless and progressive spirits of 
 the region found refuge. The comparatively free atmosphere of 
 my home and church must have unconsciously fostered a dis- 
 position which has always inclined me, if not to see good in 
 things evil, at least to lean to the side of charitable construction. 
 
 The hard and humble conditions under which my struggle for 
 existence began were in striking contrast with those easy and 
 graceful environments which marked the lot of most of the 
 favored gentlemen who have contributed to this series. The 
 difference, sixty years ago, between the neighborhood of Boston 
 and a remote Yermont village would form a theme for an inter- 
 esting essay. Still, the community into which I was born was 
 in no mean sense and degree truly educated and educational. 
 Though not much unlike a thousand other communities in rural 
 New England, I cannot help thinking that it was one of the best 
 of them. There Horace Greeley learned the art of printing, and 
 5 
 
70 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 in his autobiography he speaks of it in these flattering terms : " I 
 have never since known a community so generally moral, intelli- 
 gent, industrious and friendly ; never one where so much good 
 was known, and so little evil said, of neighbor by neighbor." It 
 is a curious fact that George Jones and Francis Euggles, founders 
 of the " New York Times," the rival of Mr. Greeley's journal, 
 both came from Poultney, as my native town is called. 
 
 Archbishop Hughes is reported to have said, " Give me the 
 training of a boy until he is ten, and you may then do what you 
 will with him." I am rather conscious that I was essentially 
 made before I was twelve years old. Through heredity, and by 
 my home and social relations, my being had taken its form and 
 pressure, so that all which followed has done little more than 
 enlarge and modify the flexible type thus determined. 
 
 A fatherless household of eight children, of which I was 
 the youngest (all cannot have Dr. Hale's happy middle place), 
 pinched by the res angusta domi, presented a rather forlorn spec- 
 tacle, and suggested a problem whose solution was beset with 
 painful uncertainty. The kindly way in which Providence 
 worked out the solution of that problem should put to shame 
 the weak faith of modern New England, whose native families 
 show, I believe, the average of a child and a half. 
 
 Unable to remember when I could not read, my first impres- 
 sions of education, in any formal and technical sense, begin with 
 a small red brick school-house fronting the village green, a broad 
 plot which was the play-ground of the little folks and the parade 
 ground of the militia at the great annual festival of June " train- 
 ing day." Here, to a mixed throng of boys and girls, the three 
 royal E's, and the coordinate G's — geography and grammar — 
 were dispensed by male teachers in the winter and female in the 
 summer. The common-school curriculum of those days took no 
 higher range, unless some " compositions " written on the slate 
 should be added. Pupils were left, for the most part, to struggle 
 with their little tasks without much help from their instructors. 
 To "learn the rules" was the great thing, the why and where- 
 fore apparently being regarded as of small consequence. 
 
 The first school-master of whom I retain any remembrance 
 was a tall, stern man, very lame, and yet of powerful physique. 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 71 
 
 lie belonged to the Draconic period of public school develop- 
 ment, the last representative in that community, I judge, of a 
 departing class and age. With him the terrorizing system, under 
 which the spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child maxim had been ab- 
 surdly strained, gave place to the moral-suasion theories and 
 cake-and-candy methods of our own day. I recall one instance 
 of the whimsical and brutal punishments which then prevailed — 
 something over fifty years ago ; and it is about the only thing 
 that I do distinctly remember of my school life under the master 
 referred to. A large boy, probably some sixteen or seventeen 
 years old, was ordered to mount an old-fashioned splint-bottomed 
 chair and bend over until his finger should touch the projecting 
 round of the seat. From some cause the boy resented the 
 humiliation, and refused to obey. For this disobedience he was 
 beaten with a savage cruelty that made me shudder at the time, 
 and even now causes my blood to boil. The " dunce-block " had 
 disappeared from my school-house, but great ingenuity was dis- 
 played in adapting penal inflictions to minor offenses. Stand- 
 ing on one foot in the middle of the room, a spectacle of reproach 
 and of warning to all beholders, was a frequent punishment. I 
 have vivid cause to remember this, from the fact that on one 
 occasion my refusal to become a " gazing-stock " involved me in 
 a serious " unpleasantness " with the female teacher, as the result 
 of which I was ignominiously subjugated, if not subdued. 
 
 My next master, and indeed the only one of this early period 
 whom I can be said distinctly to recall, belonged to the new dis- 
 pensation. Draco was gone and Solon had come. As far as I 
 can judge at this distance of time, " Deacon " Joslin — to give him 
 the title of his later life — was pretty nearly a model village 
 school-master. He was competent, wise, kind, and encouraging. 
 True, he bore the rod in the shape of a formidable little ruler, 
 or ferule, under whose vigorous taps the fractious or truant 
 urchin's hand sometimes smarted. His morning face could be 
 shadowed with clouds that boded disaster, but his justice was 
 always tempered with mercy. Under Deacon Joslin I must 
 have made considerable progress in most of the E's and G's. He 
 even commended the little attempts at doggerel rhymes which, 
 by a sudden descent upon me, he sometimes found on my slate, 
 
72 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 and to the end of his clays, only four or five years ago, would 
 surprise me by repeating some of these callow versicles. 
 
 My native village possessed one educational institution which 
 was not, I believe, very common in those days — a town library. 
 If it did not do much for me in a direct way, it certainly did 
 much for my elder brothers, for Horace Greeley (as he testifies in 
 his autobiography), and for many of the young men and maidens 
 of the community. To own the simple truth, I was not yet 
 much of a reader, and had no special taste for reading. Unlike 
 some of the members of my family, I had not devoured the town 
 library and rummaged the book-shelves of our neighbors. A sadly 
 common-place child, and as far removed as possible from the pre- 
 cocity of a little Stuart Mill, I grew to the age of twelve, eagerly 
 intent on very childish things. Fondness for books came later. 
 
 At the critical age just mentioned a great change occurred. 
 I was taken up to Jerusalem and placed at the feet of Gamaliel. 
 In plain language, I was spirited away by my brother, A. C. 
 Kendrick, to Hamilton, Madison County, -New York, and became 
 a pupil in the Hamilton Seminary, wherein he was a professor. 
 Here, under the eye of this brother, my Gamaliel, and sharing 
 his room, I entered upon a course of education proper. The 
 journey to Hamilton was my first venture beyond the circuit of 
 my native hills into the wonderland of the great world. It was 
 in 1833, just as the railway age was dawning, and my journey 
 was made by the old-fashioned stage-coach. It led through Troy 
 and Albany, which seemed to my young eyes great and splendid 
 cities. They made upon me an impression of awe which Lon- 
 don, Paris, and Eome in long subsequent years failed to equal. 
 A youth's first introduction to the wide world gives a sudden 
 expansion to his ideas and stimulates the educational process. 
 
 At Hamilton, in an atmosphere of study and surrounded by 
 my brother's already considerable library, I had great advan- 
 tages, and had they but continued I might have made a scholar. 
 It is true, the seminary, under the presidency of my venerable 
 cousin, Dr. Nathaniel Kendrick, was young and raw, and had 
 for its single aim the training of candidates for the Baptist min- 
 istry by partial courses, some of them very partial. The stu- 
 dents were in general grown men, the majority of them more than 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 73 
 
 twice my own age, and among them I was a tolerated intruder 
 because of my relation to one of the professors. The accommo- 
 dations were rude and the fare was hard, consisting largely of 
 heavy corn-meal bread and molasses, with no coffee, and every- 
 thing of the coarsest and cheapest. In those days the vegeta- 
 rian craze was in the air, and starvation commons were in many 
 places thought essential to high thinking. It is no wonder that 
 the schools and colleges annually graduated regiments of broken- 
 down dyspeptics. The religious tone of the Seminary was deeply 
 earnest, but tinged with a somewhat gloomy and fanatical zeal. 
 
 This crude school of the prophets long ago developed itself 
 into Madison University, a well-equipped institution of learn- 
 ing holding an honorable place in the great sisterhood of col- 
 leges. Even in the inchoate stage to which my story belongs, 
 the instruction which it gave was of excellent quality. In my 
 own case this instruction was supplemented, especially in the 
 ancient languages, by private lessons from my brother, who, I 
 may be allowed to say, has long been recognized as a learned 
 Grecian, and with some propriety might tell the world how he 
 was educated. The boys of to-day, with their generous food, 
 their commodious school appointments, their opportunities for 
 invigorating recreations, can little understand the hardships which 
 many of their fathers encountered in their rough academic life. 
 
 After a year or so at Hamilton, circumstances compelled me 
 to return for a while to my home in Vermont. Dropping again 
 into the school of my childhood, and placed in an English 
 grammar class, made up of boys and girls much my seniors, 
 who had been studying this subject for years, I found to my sur- 
 prise that I was easily the top scholar. I could " out-parse " the 
 best of them, showing something like a philosophical knowledge 
 of my mother tongue, though I had hardly ever opened an 
 English grammar. Of course my little acquaintance with Latin 
 explained it all. This incident has always been conclusive 
 proof to me that the conquest of one's own language most surely 
 lies through the conquest of a foreign, especially of an ancient 
 language. My experience as a teacher has convinced me that 
 of all studies that tax and trouble the youthful mind, English 
 grammar is the most mysterious. If I had a child he should 
 
74 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 never be bothered with it for a moment. He should begin his 
 English in the Latin grammar. 
 
 I may note here, as a warning to both teachers and pupils, 
 that a defective knowledge of arithmetic, followed by an unfor- 
 tunate interruption in my study of algebra, vitiated my whole 
 mathematical course. So far as arithmetic was concerned, the 
 fault, I think, was mainly that of my teachers, who failed to 
 ground me thoroughly in the principles, and were content with 
 rote and routine. If answers to the problems set were returned, 
 that was enough. The pupil's real comprehension of the process 
 was neither rigorously demanded nor much tested. In this re- 
 spect more recent methods of teaching are much superior. 
 
 When I was seventeen it was thought best that I should 
 graduate at a regular college. Accordingly, I took my depart- 
 ure for Brown University, Providence, E. I., where I matricu- 
 lated junior in the autumn of 1838. Dr. Wayland, the president, 
 was then at the summit of his fame. From my first contact 
 with him his grave and massive personality made a great im- 
 pression upon me. He was, I should say, an educating force, 
 rather than a great or inspiring teacher. He was slow in his 
 mental processes, and his method of imparting instruction 
 neither displayed nor roused any particular enthusiasm. It 
 was no uncommon thing for a bright or audacious student to 
 pose him by a sudden question. In such a case the Doctor 
 would indulge in one or two of his resounding " ahems," draw 
 his hand across his jutting brow, and, perhaps, with a mischiev- 
 ous twinkle in his keen, black eyes, put aside the questioner by 
 a halting or half jocose reply. The next day, very likely, in 
 a sort of careless or casual way he would break the flow of the 
 recitation with some such remark as this : " Ah, young gentlemen, 
 as to that matter about which Smith asked a question yester- 
 day ; " and he would then go on to lay out the subject in a lucid 
 exposition which showed that he had made it the subject of 
 special thought. If, as I have just said, Dr. Wayland was not 
 exactly magnetic or inspiring, he had a strong molding hand 
 and an informing spirit. He was calm, sincere, wise, and as 
 " judicious " as Hooker himself. If not profoundly learned or 
 very widely read, he knew enough, and had ability and tact 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 75 
 
 enough to be, in my opinion, the best college president of his 
 generation. I cannot help thinking that his "Moral Science," 
 though confessedly not up to the demands of the present time, 
 is even yet a much better text-book than some of the ponderous 
 volumes that have been allowed to supersede it. 
 
 I was graduated with the " classical oration " in the class of 
 1840, a class which has given to the world several college and 
 seminary presidents and professors, at least one governor (Gas- 
 ton, of Massachusetts), quite a number of eminent lawyers, of 
 whom the best known perhaps was the late Abraham Payne, of 
 Providence, R I., and not a few preachers of goodly repute. 
 
 I should much like at this moment to have before me the 
 curriculum of Brown in 1840, that I might compare it with her 
 course of study in the present year. The comparison would 
 doubtless reveal a great advance. In my day we had no instruc- 
 tion in history or modern languages. It would not surprise me 
 to find in some colleges the standard so raised that students now 
 begin their academic course about where they left it fifty years 
 ago. This ought to insure for the present generation of boys a 
 vastly higher education than that enjoyed by their fathers. 
 
 As I review my college life one thing still irritates me, and 
 another gives me pain. The irritating thing was my failure to get 
 any considerable good out of my Latin and Greek studies at Brown, 
 and that through no serious fault of my own. Dr. Hackett, one 
 of the best of American scholars, had just left the college when I 
 entered, and the classical department was in the hands of an ex- 
 tremely amiable but utterly incompetent professor. Eecitations 
 under him were little better than a mockery. So maidenly modest 
 and timid was he that he did not dare to correct a student when 
 making a flagrant mistranslation. He was afraid to rebuke the 
 disorderly, and when some unruly fellows were playing pranks 
 under his very eye, he would actually cover his face with his 
 book that he might not seem to see them. The result of all this 
 was that I came away from Brown University bringing little, if 
 any more Latin and Greek than I carried there. I need scarcely 
 add that Brown's deficiency at this point was soon supplied, and 
 that under Lincoln and Harkness the old university has been 
 distinguished for strength where for a little while it was almost 
 scandalously weak. 
 
76 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 What pains me in the review of my college life is the fact 
 that I graduated so young, when only nineteen. I was not suffi- 
 ciently matured to get the best results out of an academic course. 
 I am aware that there are two sides to this subject. Colonel 
 Higginson has told us that he was but seventeen when he gradu- 
 ated, and I do not remember that he expressed any regrets over 
 it. Dr. A. P. Peabody, of Harvard, informed me some years 
 since that he graduated at fifteen, and was glad of it. In pro- 
 nouncing a decision upon this matter, much would depend, of 
 course, upon the student's opportunities subsequent to leaving 
 college. Unusual precocity and exceptional advantages aside, 
 it strikes me that twenty-one is quite early enough for complet- 
 ing an academic course. 
 
 In connection with the misfortune just mentioned I made the 
 blunder of my life, looking at life from a mere educational point 
 of view — a blunder that puts me in lively sympathy with Chan- 
 cellor Yincent in the regrets which he so pathetically expressed 
 in his contribution to this series. Late in my college course I 
 had concluded that my duty pointed to the Christian ministry, 
 and to qualify myself for this vocation I returned to Hamilton 
 and entered the seminary for a course of special study. Cir- 
 cumstances, which need not be recounted, led me to defer for a 
 season the prosecution of this course. With the design of teach- 
 ing for a year or two and then returning to my seminary work, 
 I departed late in the autumn of 1840 for Georgia, where I had 
 three brothers. But I did not return. My intended absence of 
 a year or two grew into an absence of twenty-six years. Almost 
 immediately upon beginning to teach I allowed myself to begin 
 to preach in an occasional way, and after two years of school- 
 mastering I became a pastor. This, I have just said, educationally 
 viewed, was the mistake of my life. Eegarded from the point of 
 view of practical usefulness, my conduct may admit of a fair de- 
 fense. On a broad survey of my life I am not quite sure that my 
 keen regrets at the loss of a seminary training are altogether un- 
 selfish and noble. The Gospel ministry is a service that has a 
 place for various styles and degrees of training, as well as for a 
 variety of gifts. I am far from thinking it wise or even right to 
 prescribe a hard-and-fast theological course of study and disci- 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 77 
 
 pline as the condition of entrance into the Christian ministry. 
 It is quite notorious that not a few of the ablest, as well as of 
 the most successful preachers, in all times, have been men who 
 derived very little help from schools of any sort. Especially 
 with a college training one is in a way to give himself, in large 
 degree, the results of a specific seminary course of study. If he 
 has pluck and perseverance he can go on to acquire for himself 
 the best results of a technical higher education. If he has pluck 
 and perseverance — ah, there's the rub ! At all events, justly or 
 unjustly, wisely or unwisely, it has been the grief of my life that 
 I missed the broadening and enriching processes incident to a 
 full and orderly course in a theological seminary. 
 
 My two years of Georgia schoolmastering were, of course, 
 very useful in a way. The review thus involved of the most 
 elementary branches as well as of the higher, ranging from ABC 
 to Yirgil and Algebra, together with the management of pupils 
 of both sexes, of whom some were a head taller and many years 
 older than myself, was an educating experience of a very prac- 
 tical sort. The teaching service into which the average student 
 falls on leaving college constitutes for him a kind of post-gradu- 
 ate course of no mean value. 
 
 At twenty-one I became pastor of the Baptist church in 
 Macon, Georgia, and here my education began in quite another 
 fashion. Now it was education in life as well as for life, the 
 latter being quite as important as the former, as every teacher, 
 lawyer, physician, and preacher will testify. 
 
 At this point, perhaps, according to the strict rules and aims 
 of this series, my meager story ought to end. But, considering 
 how little I have had to tell, and the really boyish age at which 
 my narrative would have to leave off, the editor will perhaps 
 allow me to drop into a few autobiographic details relating to 
 my early education in the ministerial life. 
 
 My first charge was a small distracted church, from which, 
 but for the happy audacity of youth, I should have shrunk in 
 terror. Somehow I scrambled along in my work and grew, I 
 suppose, in knowledge, efficiency, and reputation. At all events 
 the church prospered and soon became what it has ever since 
 remained, one of the best Baptist churches in the South. 
 
78 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 I have ventured to speak of growing in reputation with the 
 more confidence, because, in the fourth year of my Macon min- 
 istry, I was called to the pastorate of the First Baptist Church 
 in Charleston, South Carolina, a strong body, with a long and 
 honorable history. Here, in a wider sphere and breathing the 
 atmosphere of a cultivated society, my best powers were called 
 into exercise, and my education, as I think, rapidly advanced. 
 The Charleston of that day was perhaps as refined a community 
 as this continent could show. It had large libraries, distinguished 
 scholars, an active intellectual life, much genuine culture, a high 
 pervading tone of business integrity and personal honor. Simple 
 candor obliges me to acknowledge that, making allowance for the 
 fatal limitations of slavery and the intolerant political spirit 
 which it bred, I have never lived in a society where there was 
 such a prevailing character of grace and culture as distinguished 
 the Charleston of thirty-five years ago. 
 
 Here some fifteen years of my youth and early manhood were 
 spent. Here I might have ended my education in this terres- 
 trial university but for that strange, awful, beneficent cataclysm 
 which almost rent our country in twain and ingulfed slavery in 
 a sea of blood. It was my hard fate to hear the crash of the first 
 bomb that burst over Sumter, and to watch from my attic window 
 the red glare of the rockets. All through that ever memorable 
 April day I gazed, with the vast multitude that thronged the 
 city's sea-front, upon the contest between the doomed fortress and 
 the environing batteries. I saw the black clouds of smoke rolling 
 upward when the fort took fire, and the white flag fluttering at 
 last on its rampart in token of surrender. Going away for a while 
 about mid-day I said to a northern-born brother clergyman whom 
 I chanced to meet, "There's work going on down there which 
 you and I shall not live to see the end of." " Pshaw ! " he ex- 
 claimed in scornful incredulity ; "we shall not live long then." 
 He was a Southern zealot, and had no doubt about the South's 
 speedy triumph. I felt nearly sure, on the other hand, that the 
 shot which opened the war would liberate the slave and echo 
 down the ages. The war was a great factor in my education. 
 
EIGHTH PAPER. 
 By PRESIDENT TIMOTHY DWIGHT. 
 
 The question is asked me, How I was educated. It is an 
 interesting question to myself, for it carries me back in memory 
 to the early days, and takes my thoughts into a region where I 
 see the beginnings of all that has made my intellectual life a joy- 
 ful one — a life continually growing in its joyfulness with every 
 passing year. But how it can be a question of any peculiar 
 interest to others I do not know, and whether I can answer it in 
 a satisfactory way, or can give a story worth the reading, I have 
 grave doubts. Indeed, I can hardly suppose that one person 
 can ever fully unfold to another that which has made him what 
 he is, even if he can, by any means, understand all the co-operat- 
 ing influences of which his present mental life is the result. But 
 as the inquiry is presented to me with a request for a reply to 
 it, I will say what I may find it in my power to say within the 
 limits of these few pages. If my brief story bears with it a 
 single helpful suggestion for any reader, I shall be satisfied. 
 
 The Rev. Henry "Ward Beecher, on being questioned by 
 some correspondent as to the rules of health and long life sug- 
 gested by his own experience, said, in his answer: "The first 
 rule is to select the right father and mother." I have often 
 thought that the same rule might be given with respect to intel- 
 lectual life. "Whether it be so in general or not, I will open my 
 story of myself by saying that I followed this rule, and began my 
 education by securing the right father and mother. My father 
 was of a family which had for generations been thoroughly edu- 
 cated, and the traditions of which had all favored the cultiva- 
 tion and strengthening of the intellectual life. He was himself, 
 though occupied with mercantile pursuits, an omnivorous reader. 
 He could be happy anywhere, if only surrounded by books, and 
 he was equally interested, I might almost say, in all classes of 
 books which had any reasonable claim to be read. My mother 
 
80 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 was a woman of unusual intellectual power, of extraordinary men- 
 tal acumen, of great energy, and of the most far-reaching desires 
 for her children in the matter of their education. So strong was 
 her determination that her children should be educated that, 
 as I have often thought, if there had been only one school or 
 college in the country, and that one in Oregon, she would have 
 taken her family there, regardless of all difficulties and hard- 
 ship, and would at any cost have secured for them the blessing 
 which she so highly prized. She was also an educating power 
 in herself. She received her children, from a very early period 
 in their life, into a participation in her own thought and intel- 
 lectual activity, and became to them, in this way, a continually 
 stimulating force. She had what is called magnetic power, one 
 of the most uncommon gifts, but a gift of the greatest impor- 
 tance when the education of others is the end to be attained. 
 To live under her influence was an education in itself, and I may 
 truly say that I owed more to her, in the matter of the awaken- 
 ing of my mental enthusiasm, than to any or all of the teachers 
 of my childhood and youth. Mr. Beecher was right — a man's 
 inheritance is everything; and if he has the right father and 
 mother he is, ordinarily, well on the way, even at the beginning, 
 toward the right sort of a life. 
 
 My mother was not much of a believer in schools for young 
 children. She favored home teaching. My father was much of 
 the time absent from home, and he had the wisdom, which all 
 fathers who are wise enough to marry intelligent wives ought 
 to have, to allow his wife to follow her own judgment in such 
 matters. My school days, therefore, did not begin until I was 
 eleven years old. Of the time earlier than that I will only say 
 a few words. I learned to read when I was six, and it may be 
 worth stating that, while I was learning to read, I used to stand 
 in front of my older brother or sister, facing them as they were 
 holding the book, and thus the book was, as the phrase is, " bot- 
 tom upward " to myself. I thus acquired a power which I have 
 never lost, and which it is occasionally useful to possess, of read- 
 ing with the letters reversed as readily as when they are stand- 
 ing upright. My learning to read, however, was not phenome- 
 nally early, as is the case with some children, and as was the fact 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 81 
 
 with one or two of my own family. I may add that I was not 
 a lover of reading, in my childhood. Being the youngest of the 
 household, and my brothers having been great readers, and one 
 of them having been supposed to have injured his eyes by excess 
 of reading, my mother did not encourage me to press on in this 
 line ; and though my father tried to make me follow the ancestral 
 course, he could not awaken my enthusiasm as much as he de- 
 sired. I think he doubted, during all those early years, whether 
 I should ever prove my birthright in a reading household. But, 
 as I have intimated above, I was the youngest of his children, 
 and I suppose that all fathers and mothers have for their young- 
 est child a large measure of the love that " believeth all things 
 and hopeth all things ; " and so it came to pass that my father 
 kept his faith in me through all those discouraging years, and 
 when I grew up I verily believe he thought me worthy to be his 
 youngest child. It was all because I had the right father and 
 mother. 
 
 I have said that I did not go to school until I was eleven 
 years old. As for continuous and regular attendance, and that 
 schooling which started me on what we commonly speak of as a 
 boy's education, I might, perhaps, more properly say, that it 
 began when I was twelve. I had learned a little Latin before 
 this time from a young man who was a teacher in the Hopkins 
 Grammar School, in New Haven ; and, even before I knew any- 
 thing about translating Latin, I had been taught by my oldest 
 brother to read Latin poetry, so far that I could scan Virgil's 
 hexameters more easily and rapidly than most students in college 
 are able to do it. I had made a small beginning also in French 
 with my brother, which was never lost to me afterward. He 
 was a senior in college at the time, and was in a remarkable 
 degree enthusiastic and enterprising in all lines of study which 
 opened to him. Had his life been spared, I can scarcely doubt 
 that he would have been prominent as a scholar in the profes- 
 sion of his choice. But my real school life had its beginning 
 in the city of Norwich, Connecticut, which was my birthplace, 
 and where a considerable part of my boyhood was passed. 
 There was an academy there at the time, which afterward went 
 out of being ; or perhaps it may more properly be said, it gave 
 
82 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 place to the larger and now well-known Free Academy of 
 that city. This school was conducted by Mr. Calvin Tracy, who 
 is, I think, no longer living. He had the good fortune, as I 
 also had, to be surrounded by a bright company of boys, gath- 
 ered from the best families in the place. I gained some knowl- 
 edge of arithmetic from him, especially of a system of solving 
 problems by means of cancellation, of which he was, I believe, 
 the author, but which long since passed out of my possession 
 into dim forgetfulness. He and his one assistant also taught 
 me a little Latin and Greek, so that, although I struggled hope- 
 lessly with Caesar's "Commentaries" when I began, I could at the 
 end read Virgil and Cicero, and was among the best of the scholars 
 in the various branches of study to which I was directed. The 
 boys, I think, complained, in after years — as boys very often do — 
 that he did not have the best system of instruction ; but some- 
 how or other, either by reason of what he did, or because of nat- 
 ure's gifts and the subsequent advantages which they enjoyed, a 
 goodly number of those boys have had an honorable j^ace in the 
 world. As for myself, I never pass the old building in which 
 this worthy gentleman used to teach, without a tender and 
 kindly remembrance of the days when I was a schoolboy under 
 his instruction. But the memories of the past gather so many 
 things into themselves, that I will not pretend to say how 
 much that still lingers with me belongs to the place, and how 
 much to the teacher and my fellow-pupils. The man whose 
 happy lot it is to have been born in Norwich, Connecticut, and 
 whose early years were familiar with its beautiful hills, has a 
 recollection of the past, as he passes on in his manhood life, 
 which is full of peace and pleasantness. And so long as the 
 recollection abides with him, he will be thankful for it, and will 
 be glad to think of everything which makes a part of its joy- 
 fulness. 
 
 When I was a little less than fifteen my mother returned to 
 New Haven, for the collegiate education of my brother next 
 older than myself, and I had the great good-fortune to enter the 
 Hopkins Grammar School, while it was under the charge of the 
 late Hawley Olmstead. He had been a teacher then for thirty 
 years, and was a man most thoroughly fitted for his work. He 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 83 
 
 was an enthusiast in his profession, thorough, exact, stimulating, 
 abounding in wisdom and common sense, fully acquainted with 
 boys, and capable of winning their respect and even reverence. 
 The " Old Dominie," as we used to call him, never sent a pupil 
 from his school at the end of the course without having prepared 
 him, so far as his native powers and disposition would allow, for 
 the work and life opening before him in the future. Free from 
 all the petty rules and regulations which make the conduct of 
 many of our schools a burden that is almost beyond endurance, 
 his school was a model for its reasonable government, its ex- 
 cellent instruction, its manly inspiration, its silent, but effective, 
 Christian influence. " Poor scholars " sometimes went forth 
 from it — and where is the school or college from which such 
 scholars have not gone out? — but they did not owe their poor 
 scholarship to his methods and influence, or to his neglect. As 
 for myself, at my first entrance into the company of his pupils I 
 found myself in a new atmosphere. I seemed to myself to have 
 known nothing as yet as I ought to know it, and I gained a new 
 impulse as I saw before me a true teacher, with a love of learn- 
 ing for its own sake, and a wisdom and enthusiasm which made 
 study attractive. He, like good Mr. Tracy, of whom I have 
 spoken, had an excellent company of boys about him. My boy- 
 ish friendships began in these two schools, and, as I had the home 
 influences which made me choose the right kind of friends, I 
 derived great benefit from them. Some of these friendships were 
 afterward strengthened in my college life, and thus were made 
 permanent for the years that followed. But, for the awakening 
 of my mind, and that drawing out of my powers which is the 
 true education of the man, the instruction which I received from 
 Hawley Olmstead did the work of my school life. Dr. Leonard 
 Bacon used to say of him, with a jocose allusion to his enthusi- 
 asm as a teacher : " Mr. Olmstead seemed to think that a man 
 ought to spend one half of his life in getting ready for college, 
 and the other half in going through college." This remark will 
 give an impression of his interest in his work as an instructor 
 of boys, and his devotion to it. He was near the ending of his 
 active service as a teacher when I was his pupil, but I shall always 
 remember my period of study with him as one of the blessings 
 
84 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 which a kind Providence gave me in my earlier life. During my 
 school years with him, however, as before that period, I was at 
 home. My mother and her children lived in New Haven, it 
 being a part of her plan for their education to go with them 
 where they went. In the judgment of many parents, and of 
 many other persons also, it is for the highest interest of bo}-s 
 that they should go away from home to boarding-schools, when 
 they reach the age of twelve or thirteen years. I do not propose 
 to discuss this question here. But, speaking only of myself and 
 my own education, I regard it as an inestimable privilege of my 
 childhood and youth that I was never separated from the intellec- 
 tual life of my own household ; that whatever my teachers did 
 or tried to do for me, I went to them daily from the stimulating 
 influence of the conversation of the family, and returned from 
 them to find in my home more of mental awakening than could 
 be gained even from their best efforts. 
 
 I entered Yale College just three months before my seven- 
 teenth birthday. Had it not been for the earnest counsels of the 
 "good old Dominie," I should have entered a year earlier; but 
 he thought at that time that I was not quite ready in my studies 
 to secure, beyond question, the rank in the class which he desired 
 for me as his pupil, and accordingly, much to my disappointment, 
 he persuaded my parents to keep me at school for another twelve 
 months. I have blessed his memory ever since, as I may say, 
 for the wisdom which he manifested, and for the great service 
 which he rendered me in this matter. As it was, however, I was 
 younger than three-quarters of my classmates, and was graduated 
 at the end of the course, in August, 1849, just three months to a 
 day before I became twenty-one. How well I remember the old 
 college chapel, and the seat in the gallery where I sat when I was 
 examined for admission. The solemnities and formalities of the 
 examinations, which have grown up within the past few years in 
 all our colleges, were then unknown. But an entering freshman, 
 even then, felt that the professors and tutors were pretty formi- 
 dable specimens of the human race ; and when the result of the 
 process of questioning and answering was declared to be favor- 
 able, a sense of satisfaction and relief was experienced, to which 
 life offers scarcely anything parallel. I have the impression — 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 85 
 
 though I suppose it will not do to express it publicly — that the 
 old way was about as sensible as the new one ; and that when 
 dear old Professor Kingsley announced to me, with humor spark- 
 ling in his keen eye, that I might consider myself a member of 
 Yale College, he knew what there was in me quite as well as if 
 he had read a series of examination papers, and had sent me home 
 for a week to wait for information. This, however, is only a side 
 remark, for nobody to hear. The only interesting point to the 
 public or the educators is, that the professor told me what he did. 
 I was a freshman, and, if all went well, I might hope to be a gradu- 
 ate after four years. As I had had the right father and mother, 
 and had had a wonderfully good teacher, all went well. I suppose 
 I had something to do with the matter myself. Persons who are 
 educated generally have some participation in the work of their 
 own development. The reader may judge for himself on this 
 point. The story which I have to tell is rather of what was done 
 with me, and for me. A word, therefore, of the college teachers, 
 and the college system, in my undergraduate days. The best 
 teachers whom I met, in the first three years of the course, were 
 Professor Thomas A. Thacher and Professor James Hadley. 
 The former was, at the time of my entering college, just beginning 
 his work as Assistant Professor of Latin. He had been study- 
 ing in Europe, and was full of the ardor and energy of a young 
 man whose mind was awakened by all that he had seen and 
 learned in the foreign universities. The tutors seemed old to 
 my freshman eyes, and he seemed older than they ; but he was 
 only thirty. He had the gifts which make a teacher. The clear- 
 ness and precision of his explanations, the energy and force of 
 his will, and a certain peculiar faculty, which I cannot describe, 
 of impressing what he said so that it could not pass from the 
 mind of the pupil, distinguished him above all my other instruct- 
 ors. What he was to Yale College afterward is well known to 
 many hundreds of students. Mr. Hadley was a tutor during most 
 of my college life. He met my class in our junior year, and at- 
 tracted our attention and won our esteem, from the very first day 
 of our association with him. By some accident, or through some 
 peculiar drawing of my mind and heart toward him, I became 
 
 acquainted with him in a friendly way, as I had not been in equal 
 6 
 
86 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 degree with other tutors whom I had met. As an instructor and 
 as an acquaintance, therefore, he had a marked influence upon me. 
 He was a brilliant scholar. His mind was open in every direc- 
 tion. His knowledge was exceedingly accurate and wide-reaching. 
 As a conversationalist he was very remarkable. His humor was 
 inexhaustible. No one could know him without being stimulated 
 by his example as a scholar, and incited to fresh thought and new 
 impulse by his familiar talk and conversation. These two gen- 
 tlemen received me, even in my student days, into somewhat of 
 kindly friendship, and they accomplished much for me, as well 
 as for my classmates, in the development of mental life. In my 
 senior year I came into more immediate connection with Presi- 
 dent Woolsey. The influence of his life and character, of his schol- 
 arship and intellectual greatness, are too well known to every 
 graduate of Yale College during the period of his administration, 
 to make necessary in this place a more special reference to what I 
 personally gained from him. I had the uncommon good-fortune, 
 however, to study with him, as a member of a select class of grad- 
 uates, for two years after leaving college, and I date some of the 
 best impulses of all my student life from those meetings which 
 our small company of young men used to have in his private 
 room. To be a pupil in the college years of three such men as 
 those whom I have mentioned, and to have a mind prepared by 
 previous discipline, and awakened to enthusiasm to receive what 
 they had to offer, this was my privilege, and this was, in part, 
 the way in which I was educated. 
 
 The most magnetic teacher whom I have known in America, 
 and one more magnetic than any teacher whom I met in my stu- 
 dent days in Europe, with a single exception, was the late Dr. Na- 
 thaniel W. Taylor. I came under his instruction in the Divinity 
 School at New Haven. He was a man built on a grand scale. 
 To me he was inspiring in a degree beyond my power to describe. 
 I never heard him lecture without having my mind interested and 
 stirred. When I heard him for the first time, after an interval 
 during which I had been occupied with other things, I felt that 
 I must at the earliest possible moment take up the subject, what- 
 ever it might be, on which he was speaking, and make it a mat- 
 ter of special investigation. I felt, indeed, that I could scarcely 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 87 
 
 wait a day before making myself acquainted with it. Of all 
 powers in a teacher, this is, in my judgment, the greatest and 
 most desirable. If the teacher can stimulate the mind of his 
 pupil, and give him a powerful impulse and enthusiasm, he ac- 
 complishes his best work, iind this Dr. Taylor did for me. 
 But I was, as I have already intimated, beyond the limits of my 
 undergraduate career before I entered his lecture-room. 
 
 I have spoken of the magnetic power in teaching. The ab- 
 sence of this power in many or most teachers is greatly to be 
 lamented. But, like the poetic gift, it is a natural endowment 
 of some men only, not of all. And I do not suppose that 
 most of my instructors in the early days could have been mag- 
 netic, if they had tried to be so. Yet I cannot help thinking 
 that the college system of that time was somewhat at fault 
 in this regard. The methods of teaching were not what they 
 might have been. When I was in college there was too much 
 memorizing, especially in a verbal way; too much of mere 
 recitation ; too little opportunity for questions on the student's 
 part ; too little call for individual and private investigation by 
 the student. It has become fashionable, however, in these last 
 few years, to criticise the old methods, and I would not add my 
 word to the many which others have spoken or written. The 
 movement since my college life has not been without any mis- 
 takes, and the perfect methods are, no doubt, yet in the future. 
 But I canDot help feeling, in view of my own college course, and 
 of all that I have seen since then, that the great defect of the 
 past and the present education lies in the want of personal 
 and individual intercourse between the teacher and his pupil — 
 immediate contact of the mind of the former with the mind of 
 the latter — in such a degree as is to be desired for the pupil's 
 highest inspiration. Our system of education, which has been 
 growing in popularity of late in all our higher institutions of 
 learning, places the student far too much in a kind of great 
 machine, where his individuality is lost in the working of the 
 machinery. It is the mind and the man which we need to 
 develop, and to this end something more than text-books and 
 examinations are necessary. 
 
 Of my studies in college I will only say that I regarded my- 
 
88 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 self as more successful, according to the records of scholarship 
 on the instructors' books, in the mathematical branches than in 
 the classical. But I never was conscious of possessing what is 
 strictly called the "mathematical gift." By reason of my studies 
 with President Woolsey after graduation, and of one of the acci- 
 dents which, at that period, often determined a college tutor's 
 department of teaching, my work was afterward directed to- 
 ward the Greek language. The enthusiasm of my subsequent 
 student life was thus turned into this line, and especially into 
 the line of the Greek of the New Testament, and Biblical inter- 
 pretation. The studies in mental philosophy, logic, etc., were 
 the most interesting of all in my undergraduate course, and, in 
 my judgment, they are the most valuable of all studies for the 
 building up of mental power. The duties of life, however, forced 
 me to turn aside from them after a time. 
 
 The period of education referred to in the question which 
 has been presented to me, closes, I believe, about the time of col- 
 lege graduation. But, when speaking of my own case, I cannot 
 properly omit a brief reference to a two years' residence in Eu- 
 rope, from 1856 to 1858. The studies of those two years formed 
 a part of my preparation for my work in life, and an important 
 part. The influence of my connection with the universities of 
 Bonn and Berlin, and of my residence in Germany, came not so 
 much from what I learned, as from the methods, which were new 
 to me, and from the different position from which I was led to 
 look at the student life. There is no "royal road to learning" 
 in Europe, any more than there is in America. This I soon dis- 
 covered. But when a student has made sufficient progress at 
 home to enable him to know what to do in a course of study in 
 Germany, he can gain there an impulse which may be very help- 
 ful to him. I had the good-fortune to go abroad at that stage of 
 my progress, and I have had an ever-increasing enthusiasm in 
 all my intellectual life as the result. Very many students take 
 their course in Europe too early — immediately after their gradu- 
 ation at college — and thus lose much of the benefit which they 
 might receive three or four years later. It is far better, as I am 
 persuaded, to have the training not only of the college, but of 
 the professional school in this country, before one resorts to 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 89 
 
 the German universities. My own European life was placed be- 
 tween the years of my tutorship in the college and the time, as 
 it afterward somewhat unexpectedly proved to be, of my pro- 
 fessorship ; and the gift which it bestowed upon me has been the 
 source, in large measure, of whatever I have been able to do for 
 others since I began my more permanent work. 
 
 Eev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in his answer to the question 
 proposed by The Forum, says : " The good of a college is not 
 in the things which it teaches. The good of a college is to be 
 had from ' the fellows ' who are there, and your associations with 
 them." I cannot agree with him in the full sweep of these sen- 
 tences, and if this were the only good of a college I should be 
 disposed to doubt whether colleges ought to exist, or whether 
 they would continue to exist. But " the fellows " did me much 
 good in the way of my education. I had a most excellent and 
 worthy set of friends, especially in the last year of my college 
 life. My association with them drew me out of myself, and gave 
 me, in the best meaning of the term, the sense and the impulse 
 of good-fellowship. As bearing upon my preparation for my 
 life's work, this association did much to give me that common 
 sense, and sympathy, and warm-heartedness, and love of young 
 men, and comprehension of their nature and their feelings, the 
 value of which is so great to a college teacher. The college 
 friendships, in their best development, came to me at the most 
 fortunate period — in the later years of the course. They came 
 at a time when they could operate most healthfully and happily 
 upon all that I had gained from my studies and my teachers, 
 and rounded out for me, if I may so express it, the education 
 which belonged to the university. But as with a man's father 
 and mother, so with his college friends : it becomes him to be 
 very careful in selecting the right ones. I was happy enough to 
 make such a selection. 
 
 My simple story is told. If there is any suggestion which it 
 offers, it is, I think, that of the importance of the family life in 
 giving the impulse to intellectual growth. Education is like 
 religion in many respects. It is so in this. The children of a 
 household grow most easily and naturally in the religious life, 
 not when the parents are always talking about it, and pressing it 
 
90 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 upon them, but when the atmosphere of the house is so full of 
 religion that they do not think of living any other life. And, in 
 the same way, when parents make their children sharers in a 
 true intellectual life possessed by themselves, and make the 
 house full of the sense of the blessedness of knowing, the minds 
 of the children will surely be awake to knowledge, and will 
 be educated as the years go on. My own mind was awakened 
 in this way. The years of manhood have not done for me all 
 that I could have wished, or all that they may have done for 
 many others ; but the impulse given me in my early home 
 made me rejoice in the working of my own mental powers, and, 
 whatever I may accomplish, or fail to accomplish, to the view of 
 others, I have found so much delight in this working, and in 
 observing it, that I am sure that I shall never intellectually go 
 to sleep. And so my answer to the question, How I was edu- 
 cated, ends where it began : I had the right mother. 
 
NINTH PAPER 
 By PEESIDENT E. Q. EOBINSON. 
 
 It was not my good-fortune to be born into a literary atmos- 
 phere, nor to spend any of my earlier days in " tumbling about in 
 a library." My parents were addicted neither to letters nor to 
 science, and the young negress who looked after me in my ten- 
 derest years fulfilled all her commission in simply keeping me 
 out of harm's way. 
 
 When I was a little more than four and a half years old 
 my father died, leaving an encumbered estate, and my mother 
 with four children, of whom I was youngest. Of the schools I 
 attended prior to my eighth year not even the faintest remem- 
 brance now remains. Of struggles with words and of a sense of 
 victory in learning to read long before this, I have a vivid recol- 
 lection, but of teachers and schools all remembrance has vanished. 
 The earliest recollection that I have of being in a schoolroom 
 goes back to the time when I must have been nearly four and a 
 half years of age. How I happened to be there I cannot say ; 
 certainly, not as a regular scholar ; probably as a casual visitor 
 with older sisters. The recollection is not of anything studied 
 or learned, but of a great fright when the school had been dis- 
 missed, and the scholars had all left. It was in a late summer or 
 early autumn afternoon when, wearied from play, or lulled by the 
 hum of the schoolroom, I had lain down on one of the long seats 
 and fallen fast asleep. Hidden by the desk from the eye of the 
 teacher, and forgotten by my sisters, I had been left asleep and 
 locked up alone. I awoke when all had left, and the alarm and 
 wailing that followed have never wholly faded from my memory. 
 
 At eight my school-days and education began in earnest. It 
 was to a large school kept by a Mr. Hill, in Pawtucket (then 
 in Massachusetts, but since ceded to Rhode Island), that I was 
 sent. Here most of the scholars of both sexes were much older 
 than myself. Chief among many unprofitable tasks imposed 
 
92 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 upon me was the study of Lindley Murray's English Grammar. 
 I was compelled to learn indefinite quantities of detail about 
 "parts of speech," under the designation of "Etymology," and 
 to commit to memory verbatim the twenty -two rules of "Syntax," 
 and apply these in " parsing." Human ingenuity could hardly 
 have devised anything more dreary and destructive of all child- 
 ish interest. So desperate was the effort to master some of these 
 rules that they have never ceased to haunt me with unpleasant 
 memories. So far as any usefulness was concerned, any other 
 English words arbitrarily combined would have served the same 
 end. The weary months spent on that grammar were worse than 
 wasted ; they did me a permanent injury. I acquired the par- 
 rot-like habit of' recitation, and of reading without taking in the 
 sense of what I read. That study of grammar came near mak- 
 ing useless the next few years of my school-life. But there was 
 one lesson learned by me at Mr. Hill's big school that has been 
 invaluable to me ever since — a lesson learned not from books, 
 but from a fellow-student and Mr. Hill's blind savagery of dis- 
 cipline. A youth named Lord, much older than I, sat directly 
 in front of me, having, as all scholars then had, a " ruler," which 
 he contrived in some way to thrust through the back of his seat 
 for my special annoyance. I seized it, and, on his trying to give 
 it a wrench, for my greater annoyance, it snapped with a loud re- 
 port. The ever- watchful master, with rawhide in hand — he was 
 never without it during school-hours — was at once on the spot, 
 demanding an explanation of the noise. "With childish simplicity, 
 I told the story of it just as it was, which Lord vehemently de- 
 nied, and denounced me as the offender. Older and bolder than 
 I, he browbeat me into the weakened statement that I " thought 
 he did it." The result was that for the first and only time in 
 my life I tasted the qualities of a rawhide. The lesson, not to be 
 frightened out of what I knew to be the truth, was worth to me 
 all it cost, and has been more valuable in life than all I learned 
 from Lindley Murray's Grammar. 
 
 For a year or two after leaving Hill's I attended two other 
 schools, one of them new, but short-lived, and ambitiously styl- 
 ing itself an academy. What I brought away from them, in spite 
 of more grammar, parsing, geography, and arithmetic, so far as 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 93 
 
 I can now remember, was of infinitesimal value. "When I was 
 about ten years old my mother went into the country, to reside 
 on the old paternal farm. This filled me with unbounded de- 
 light. The spring-time, the open fields, the birds, the blossom- 
 ing orchards, the planting of gardens, banished all thoughts of 
 school, and made life a genuine pleasure. Three or four years 
 slipped away, my education being conducted chiefly in a country 
 district school. The school was, perhaps, equal to the average 
 of the Massachusetts schools of that day ; but as I now recall 
 it, nothing in the way of teaching, so far as I was concerned, 
 could have been more worthless. One winter afternoon, how- 
 ever, in that country schoolhouse, still lingers with me as one 
 of the pleasantest of memories. Among the books used in the 
 school was a reading-book, made up mostly of extracts from well- 
 known English authors. Among these was Johnson's " Hermit 
 of Teneriff'e." Something induced me to read it. I was ab- 
 sorbed; consciousness of my surroundings ceased. When the 
 brief story was finished, the slanting rays of the sun seemed to 
 have transfigured the room. I was with the hermit on the slope 
 of Teneriffe. It was my first conscious taste of literature. I had 
 read " Robinson Crusoe," " The Pilgrim's Progress," and other 
 books of interest to boys ; but nothing had ever interested me 
 like this story. Why it so affected me I cannot tell, unless there 
 may have been some mental mood to which it chanced at the in- 
 stant to be specially fitted. 
 
 Little as these years of country life did for me in the way of 
 mental training, they nurtured a naturally weak constitution into 
 a strength that has since been equal to many a year of mental 
 strain. The right influence during these years would easily have 
 given a permanent bent of taste to natural science. That influ- 
 ence came near being exerted during my twelfth year, but it was 
 toward a branch of science on which there was then practically 
 nothing to guide me. A paternal uncle who, with weakened 
 health, had abandoned the practice of medicine, had devoted 
 himself with great zeal to mineralogy. He had traveled far and 
 wide throughout the Southern, Middle, and New England States ; 
 had frequently consulted and corresponded with Professors 
 Cleveland and Silliman, and had published an elaborate cata- 
 
94 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 logue of all known American minerals and their localities. He 
 had gathered what at that day was regarded as a rare and valuable 
 cabinet of minerals. His blow-pipe processes for testing and de- 
 termining his various finds interested me greatly ; but before my 
 interest had taken definite form, failing health compelled him 
 to seek the milder atmosphere of St. Augustine, where he soon 
 died. His cabinet having been purchased by Professor Webster 
 for Harvard College, my interest in mineralogy soon expired 
 from lack of nourishment. 
 
 When I was fourteen, my mother decided that something must 
 be done toward giving me a better education than I was then 
 receiving, or was likely to receive at home, and so sent me to 
 " Day's Academy," as it was called, a well-known school of that 
 time, at Wrentham, Mass. I then had no thought of going to 
 college, and was accordingly put to such studies as suited the 
 convenience of the principal, and seemed to him not wholly un- 
 fit for a boy of my age and needs. Among these were geogra- 
 phy, natural philosophy, parsing in Milton's " Paradise Lost," 
 and the " Political Class-Book." Mr. Perkins, the principal, was 
 overworked, had more pupils than he could properly instruct, 
 and withal was a dull and uninspiring teacher. With the ex- 
 ception of a mere smattering of mechanical principles, misnamed 
 Natural Philosophy, and perhaps a perceptible shade of increase 
 in mental discipline, the only real gain made at this school was 
 in some slight knowledge, derived from the " Political Class- 
 Book," of the constitution of our national government, as well 
 as of the governments of the several States of the Union. 
 
 Just how long I remained at Day's Academy I cannot now 
 remember, nor precisely what followed my leaving it. I only 
 remember spending another summer on the ancestral farm, with 
 another trial of the country public school. The year came near 
 proving a total loss educationally, though I made some progress 
 in my knowledge of books. Physical mishaps, disabling and 
 shutting me up in the house, compelled me to seek recreation in 
 reading. I was now sixteen years old, and it was necessary for 
 me to decide on my future in life. The question then was, should 
 I go to college? The reply of my mother was : "If I thought 
 you would come to anything, or be anybody, I would gladly have 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 95 
 
 you go ; but to send you to college and have you come out a 
 
 gambler and horse-racer, like Dr. [naming a well-known 
 
 young physician], I cannot think of it." And it must be admit- 
 ted that all attempts up to that time to give me an education had 
 been comparatively futile. They could hardly have been more 
 ill-advised. Over-crowded schools, incompetent teachers, and the 
 radical mistake of frequently changing schools, with intervals be- 
 tween the changes of long mental idleness, had borne their natural 
 fruits. I was a boy past sixteen, with no desire for education, 
 and with about the worst possible habits of study. But it was 
 decided that I might, if I wished, prepare for college, and that 
 for this purpose I should go to a preparatory school at New 
 Hampton, N. H., in the immediate vicinity of a well-known 
 school for young women, at which a sister was then a pupil. 
 
 It was past the middle of March ; the snow had all disap- 
 peared from Southern Massachusetts ; the robins had come, and 
 the spring had fairly begun, when, with a full supply of clothing 
 for a year, I was put on board a stage-coach for Boston, with the 
 understanding that two days and a half of stage traveling would 
 bring me to my destination. With less knowledge of the world 
 than then belonged to the average boy of my age, that stage 
 journey was itself distinctively educational. The landing at 
 Wild's Hotel, Elm Street, Boston, the great center for the stage 
 travelers of that day ; the start at four in the morning for Con- 
 cord, N. H. ; the loud rattling of the coach-wheels over the cob- 
 ble-stone pavement of the empty streets, in the cold darkness of 
 that dreary March morning ; the frightful state of the roads, pro- 
 longing the one day's drive to Concord into two ; the exchange 
 of wheels for runners on the fourth day from home, with the 
 " sea-sickness " that followed, all had their lessons for me. I 
 reached New Hampton the most forlorn and disheartened boy 
 ever dropped among merry school-fellows. The surrounding 
 country at once interested me more than the school. I was made 
 the room-mate of a soulless student, much older than myself, with 
 whom it was impossible for me to have a particle of sympathy, 
 and was set to work on Adams's "Latin Grammar," simply com- 
 mitting to memory its larger type, and its declensions of nouns 
 and conjugations of verbs. My teacher, a middle-aged man, was, 
 
96 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 to speak truly, the most stupid person I have ever seen filling 
 the office of teacher. Nothing could have been more perfunctory 
 than his instruction. If I recited the text verbatim, well and 
 good ; if not, he simply repeated the words for me and nothing 
 more. When the spring vacation came, I determined to quit 
 Latin, abandoning all thought of college, and deciding to devote 
 myself to such English studies as the school might offer. Dur- 
 ing the vacation there came to the school, from somewhere in 
 Maine, a man who had several years before been prepared for 
 college, but who, through some family disaster, had failed to en- 
 ter. Having become a zealous Christian, he had resolved to fit 
 himself for the Christian ministry, and had come to New Hamp- 
 ton to review his studies preparatory to entering college in the 
 autumn. Becoming interested somehow in my welfare, and win- 
 ning my confidence, he remonstrated against my purpose to drop 
 the thought of college, and insisted on my resuming the study 
 of Latin, with him as my instructor. And he knew by instinct 
 how to teach. He was the first man that up to that time had 
 ever kindled within me a spark of enthusiasm in any study. He 
 soon had me all aglow. Till he left for college I was daily in his 
 room, working with a zeal to me never known before nor equaled 
 since. The spirit caught from him survived throughout the re- 
 mainder of the year, notwithstanding the dreariest kind of teach- 
 ing. Mr. Moses Curtis, the friend who thus saved me from a 
 misstep, was a man of rare parts, of high endowments, and of 
 warm sympathies. He died of hemorrhage of the lungs while in 
 college, and seldom have I suffered so grievous a loss. "With 
 the return of spring, having outgrown all my clothes, which 
 could not be replaced where I was, I started for home, where I 
 was greeted on the threshold with shouts of laughter at my 
 lengthened limbs and apparently shortened clothing. I was in- 
 wardly more changed than outwardly, and was now intent on a 
 college education. 
 
 I had then to decide whether I would return to New Hamp- 
 ton. It was not an attractive school ; at least, it had no attrac- 
 tions for me. A new academy at Pawtucket, Mass., had been 
 opened, under the principalship of Mr. Joseph Hale, a graduate 
 of Harvard College It was decided that I should enter it. At 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 9? 
 
 first I boarded in the family of a young and newly married phy- 
 sician near the academy, but as the spring drew near to summer, 
 an old yearning for the country revived with force. The dis- 
 tance between the academy and my country home was two miles, 
 and I resolved to try the experiment of walking it daily. The 
 experiment was a complete success. A fondness for solitary 
 country walks was thus acquired that has never forsaken me. 
 The delight of the mornings and evenings in the orchards and 
 woods, and among the birds, was incessant. The year passed 
 swiftly by, and I made fair progress under Mr. Hale in the study 
 of Greek, besides doing something in Latin. But there was for 
 me in the Pawtucket academy one serious drawback ; I had 
 and could have no classmates. I needed instruction in three, if 
 not four, distinct branches. As a single pupil the requisite time 
 and attention could not be given me. The New Hampton acad- 
 emy, during my absence from it, had undergone a change ; it had 
 now younger and more competent teachers. There was a class 
 of several young men who were to enter college in the fall, and 
 I joined them. That second summer among the hills of New 
 Hampshire was the happiest of all my school-days ; long strolls, 
 pleasant companionships, and withal teachers superior to those I 
 had previously known there, made me contented and joyous. In 
 September I entered Brown University. 
 
 There had been many and radical defects in my pre-collegiate 
 training. My instructors, especially the earlier of them, had 
 been of the poorest possible quality. Frequent change of 
 schools made what in itself was bad still worse. If my good 
 mother, who was intent on giving her children the best educa- 
 tion she could provide, could have sent me in my fourteenth 
 year either to Phillips Exeter or to Phillips Andover Academy, 
 instead of sending me at a later day almost directly past their 
 doors to an inferior school, the result for me would have been 
 different ; but she was ill-advised, and the penalty was mine. 
 
 I entered college when I was nineteen, having among my 
 classmates several well-advanced scholars, who had been trained 
 at some of the best preparatory schools in the country. I felt at 
 once the inferiority of my preparation in comparison with theirs, 
 and was disheartened. Severe illness almost at the outset drove 
 
98 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 me home ; hence my first term in college was nearly lost time. 
 The second was a great improvement on the first. Could the im- 
 provement have progressively continued, the result of my college 
 life would have been different from what it was ; but the memory 
 of the first term haunted me ; my courage and ambition sank to 
 the verge of extinction. To add to my misfortune, the most in- 
 timate of my friends, though pure in their lives and morally 
 wholesome as associates, were low in their aims as scholars, sat- 
 isfied with very little and very superficial work. They had been 
 sent to college to prepare for the ministry, and were fair speci- 
 mens of the average of a class of men not yet wholly extinct. 
 Selected, and aided by beneficiary funds, as "candidates for the 
 ministry," they seemed to regard themselves as absolved from 
 the duty of high aims as scholars, and dropped into the wretched 
 cant of " laying aside ambition as unworthy the servants of the 
 Lord." 
 
 But, on the other hand, it was my good-fortune to be a mem- 
 ber of a debating society composed of a very different sort of 
 men from those who were my most intimate friends. In direct 
 education for the real work of life, no influences of my college- 
 days were equal to those of this society. It called into use, and 
 fastened in my memory, what little I learned from text-books 
 and in lecture-rooms ; it prompted to inquiries and investigations 
 that otherwise would never have been made ; it stimulated to the 
 exercise of all my intellectual faculties, as the set tasks of pro- 
 fessors never could. In many particulars the typical college of 
 to-day is manifestly superior to that of fifty years ago ; but, in 
 the societies of its students for the cultivation of literature and 
 skill in debate, its inferiority is too marked not to awaken solici- 
 tude as well as regret, in the minds of all friends of liberal learn- 
 ing. Societies professedly literary, it is true, abound in the 
 college of to-day ; but they are societies in which social elements 
 so predominate over every other that their influence on college 
 life is to enhance its expensiveness, and to split its classes into 
 rival cliques, rather than to quicken their intellects and to rouse 
 them to high endeavor. Nothing yet devised has filled, or can 
 fill, as a means of education, the place of the great debating 
 societies, composed of representatives from every class in col- 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 99 
 
 lege, at once imposing and inspiring from their numbers, which 
 were so marked a feature of the college of forty or fifty years 
 
 Brown University, when I became a student in it, was not 
 strong in its classical and its mathematical departments, which 
 then comprised the larger part of its established curriculum. If 
 a student became proficient in either of these studies, it was in 
 spite of professorial influence. Latin and Greek could hardly, on 
 deliberate purpose, have been more inefficiently taught. In my 
 sophomore year, however, came a great and radical change, com- 
 paratively a revolution, in the teaching of Latin. It came with the 
 appointment of a new professor, young and enthusiastic, whose 
 accurate methods and contagious spirit of enthusiasm put new life 
 into all his classes, and were felt throughout the college. To this 
 young professor, Horatio B. Hackett, afterward known as one of 
 the most eminent of American biblical scholars, I owe a debt of 
 gratitude such as is due to none of my other teachers of language. 
 Under him, the year after my graduation, I first studied German, 
 and when, in the following year, he became Professor of Biblical 
 Literature in the Newton Theological Institution, I followed him 
 thither, studying under him both Hebrew and New Testament 
 Exegesis, and revering him as one of the most exact of scholars 
 and best of teachers ; and when, years afterward, I came to know 
 him still better as a colleague, I learned both to love and honor 
 him as one of the truest and most conscientious of scholars 
 and men. Ehetoric, when I entered Brown, was cultivated with 
 marked success under the distinguished professor, William E. 
 Godclard ; but the class of which I was a member pursued that 
 study under the tuition of the then youthful but no less skillful 
 and since distinguished professor, William Gammell. By no 
 means the least valuable part of my college education came from 
 reading during the vacations, especially the long winter vaca- 
 tions, though it must be admitted that too much attention was 
 given to the novels of Cooper and Scott. 
 
 The most profitable portion of my college life was its last 
 year, under the instruction of President Wayland. He was then 
 in the ripe fullness of his powers. His specialty as a teacher was 
 moral science, though he also taught political economy. But 
 
100 HOW I WAS EDUCATED 
 
 the latter interested him only theoretically ; the former practically 
 and intensely. His strong sense of justice and his profound love 
 of truth made him a most impressive teacher of ethics — the most 
 impressive I have ever known ; and his keen sense of humor, 
 his quick wit, his appreciation of wit in others, always made 
 his recitation-room a very lively place. He was no metaphy- 
 sician ; his moral science, even in its distinctively theoretic por- 
 tions, was more practical than metaphysical, no part of it rest- 
 ing on any metaphysical system, avowed or implied. When I 
 was his pupil, mental philosophy, even on its psychological side, 
 had received from him only casual attention. His treatise on 
 " Intellectual Philosophy " was written after I had passed from 
 under him, and years after his views of moral science had be- 
 come inflexibly fixed. Nor was he widely read in the science 
 of ethics. Allusions in his lecture-room to authors whose views 
 differed from his own were extremely rare. He had thought out 
 his ethical principles for himself, and his convictions were clear 
 and strong, and rooted in the very depths of his being. Above 
 all men whom I ever knew, he was himself the embodiment of 
 what he taught. Clear and analytic in his own thinking, he in- 
 sisted on analyzed and logical thought in his pupils. Possessed of 
 a stature and a muscular development and a physiognomy that 
 would have made him an admirable model for a Jupiter Tonans, 
 and animated by a spirit that lifted him above everything selfish 
 and mean, he succeeded beyond every other college president 
 of his time, I suspect, in impressing himself and his sentiments 
 on all who came under his instruction. 
 
 The class of which I was a member had the good-fortune to 
 be under Dr. "Wayland in a year specially favorable for the best 
 results of his teaching. It was the year in which he was writing 
 and sending to the press his once famous little book on " The 
 Limitations of Human Responsibility." His "Moral Science" 
 had pleased neither slaveholders nor abolitionists. It had 
 offended the former by going too far in its condemnation of 
 slavery ; the latter by not going far enough. He was between 
 two raging fires. To defend himself, chiefly against the aboli- 
 tionists, he wrote his " Limitations." Most of the positions taken, 
 and of the principles defended, came up for questioning and dis- 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 101 
 
 cussion by our class. The teacher was full of his subject, en- 
 couraging and entering into the discussions with the liveliest 
 zest. And our class contained, in proportion to its size — com- 
 prising but thirty students — an unusual number of bright intel- 
 lects, furnishing afterward two chief -justices, one United States 
 minister to a foreign court, one bishop, several professors in the 
 higher institutions of learning, and the author of the Civil Ser- 
 vice Eeform Bill. The mutual stimulus of the class was no un- 
 important factor in our education. 
 
 I left college with perhaps an average knowledge of Latin, 
 Greek, and mathematics ; of modern languages, history, and 
 mental science I had learned nothing ; of chemistry, physiology, 
 and geology I had acquired a smattering ; of Butler's " Analogy " 
 and of ethics I had obtained a fair degree of knowledge. I had 
 drifted aimlessly into college and drifted aimlessly through it, 
 waking up only during the last year to see what I might and 
 ought to have done. A year of indecision and semi-idleness 
 brought me to the determination to become a student of theol- 
 ogy, and to enter the Christian ministry. I then went to work 
 in earnest, with a will and a purpose, giving my days to pre- 
 scribed work, reserving an hour or two for German and asso- 
 ciate readings with chosen fellow-students, and devoting my 
 evenings to philosophy and literature. Not a little of what was 
 given as theological instruction was about as insipid and unin- 
 spiring as concentrated dullness could make it. Two of the 
 professors, however — Hackett, already alluded to, and Barnas 
 Sears, afterward occupant of various high offices — gave by their 
 examples and their quickening words a bias and impulse to my 
 mind, and directed it toward lines of inquiry that I have never 
 since wholly ceased to pursue. To the teachers into whose hands 
 I fell during the first sixteen years of my life I find it impos- 
 sible to be grateful ; of those whom I subsequently met, for the 
 good offices of some I am profoundly thankful, while for the 
 services of others my grateful emotions have not always been 
 irrepressible. 
 7 
 
TENTH PAPER. 
 By PRESIDENT JAMES B. ANGELL. 
 
 I SHALL aim to make this sketch, furnished at the request of 
 the editor, as far as possible a description of the manner in which 
 a boy in Rhode Island was taught, in school and in college, in 
 the third and fourth decades of this century. A study of the 
 methods then employed may not be without interest and profit 
 to some, especially to those who are familiar only with the more 
 recent methods. 
 
 Being born in a country town, from the age of three years to 
 that of seven I attended the district schools of the neighbor- 
 hood. The furniture and the organization of the schools were 
 alike simple. So far as I can recollect, there was a fairly earnest 
 spirit of study among those hardy farmers' boys and girls. The 
 young man who had " ciphered through " Daboll's Arithmetic 
 was something of a hero, and his presence and occasional assist- 
 ance stimulated the younger pupils to imitation. To make our 
 writing-books we purchased paper, folded and stitched the sheets, 
 covered them with brown paper, and ruled the lines with our 
 plummets. In the winter, the thawing of inkstands and the 
 mending of our goose-quill pens consumed a good part of the 
 first hour. At a pretty early age a bright scholar would have 
 covered the whole range of study offered, and if, as often hap- 
 pened, he continued to attend the school, he could simply cipher 
 through his familiar Daboll again and again. But perhaps, 
 owing to this repetition, the old-fashioned district school did so 
 ground many a man in the elements of scholarship that the edu- 
 cation stood him in good stead in the discharge of the duties of 
 life. I have sometimes questioned whether, in our pride over 
 the schools of later days, we have not unwittingly failed to do 
 full justice to the work accomplished in the rude country school- 
 houses of the past generation. 
 
 When I was seven years of age a Quaker teacher came into 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 103 
 
 our neighborhood, and opened a boarding and day school, in 
 which pupils could be carried farther and taught better than in 
 the district school. I was transferred to his school, and remained 
 there four years or more. In this private school, as in the dis- 
 trict schools, there was little attempt at classification; in teach- 
 ing arithmetic, algebra, and surveying, none at all. Each pupil 
 advanced as rapidly as he could. The teacher came round 
 at least twice in the day to inspect the work done on the slate, 
 to ask explanations, and to remove difficulties. The instruction 
 was thus emphatically personal. The teacher reached each one 
 of us individually, and adapted his instruction to our respective 
 needs and peculiarities. The bright and diligent were not de- 
 layed by the dull ; the dull had opportunity to see what the 
 bright and diligent could accomplish. We had to copy all 
 our mathematical examples, with the full operation, into our 
 manuscript books, in a neat hand. The work which we did 
 under this thorough and exacting teacher none of us ever had 
 to do over again. Better elementary instruction one could not 
 ask. The discipline in this school, as in the district schools, was 
 strict. The ferule and the rawhide were not excluded by the 
 adherence of the teacher to the peaceful doctrines of George 
 Fox, and his hot and hasty temper was not altogether checked 
 by the soothing meditations of the First Day and Fifth Day 
 meetings. But a good number of gray-haired men in Ehode 
 Island remember with appreciation the solid English education 
 which the stern Quaker, Isaac Fiske, imparted to them in the 
 schoolhouse in Scituate. Is it so clear as some think that the 
 classification of students, however carefully arranged, yields 
 better results than this personal method of instruction? Of 
 course, this personal method is possible only where the number 
 of pupils is small. 
 
 By the time I was twelve years old this good teacher had 
 carried me through all the studies he undertook to teach, in- 
 cluding algebra to equations of the second degree, and surveying. 
 He then frankly told my parents that I ought to be sent to some 
 school where I could be taught Latin. Accordingly, I went to 
 the academy in Seekonk, Mass. I found that my Quaker teacher 
 had carried me, in mathematics, quite beyond the point reached 
 
104 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 in the academy by boys of my age, and it was decided that I 
 should give my whole time to Latin. And here I received a 
 most impressive lesson on the contrast between an irrational and 
 a rational mode of teaching Latin, and also on the benefit of con- 
 centration of the mind on one study. A class of boys a little 
 older than I had been studying for nearly two years the Latin 
 Grammar, committing to memory the long abstract rules and lists 
 of exceptions to the rules, but had been asked to read hardly any 
 Latin. They were then learning the syntax. A more horrible 
 torture could scarcely be imagined for criminals. The absurdity 
 and the cruelty of the process are almost equally unimaginable. 
 Fortunately, as the principal was too busy to take charge of me, 
 I was turned over to a lady teacher, and formed a class by my- 
 self. She taught me by a more rational method, allowing me to 
 regale myself with translations of easy Latin as soon as I had 
 mastered the chief paradigms. She led me through the most im- 
 portant rules of syntax, but did not load me down with the in- 
 terminable lists of exceptions. The consequence was, that at the 
 end of three months I could read simple Latin with that pleasure 
 which a child always finds in the consciousness that he can un- 
 derstand a strange tongue, and I was informed that I could join 
 the class which had been studying two years by that other 
 ridiculous method, and which at last it was deemed safe to put 
 to work on Caesar or Virgil. But I did not return to that school. 
 An academy having been established about this time in my 
 native town, I studied there for most of the time during the two 
 following years. The two principal male instructors, Rev. Hosea 
 Quinby and Mr. S. L. Weld, were men of experience in the tra- 
 ditional methods of the New England academy. Without 
 being able to lay claim to reputation for exact scholarship, they 
 had a genuine love of learning, a devotion to their profession, 
 and the gift of interesting and, in a fair degree, at least, of stimu- 
 lating pupils. Most of the pupils were farmers' sons and daugh- 
 ters, who desired to supplement the attainments they had made 
 in the district school by a few months of study in more ad- 
 vanced branches. A few studied Latin and Greek, with a more 
 or less distinct purpose of preparing themselves for college. 
 With no such distinct purpose, I also studied the ancient Ian- 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 105 
 
 guages, and pushed on through algebra and geometry. In addi- 
 tion, I took nearly all the scientific instruction which was given ? 
 and the course in mental philosophy. No plan had been marked 
 out for me. Being fond of study, and almost equally fond of all 
 branches, I took nearly everything that was taught, merely be- 
 cause it was taught. There was ' an excellent spirit of study in 
 the school. Many of the students were men in years. They had 
 saved a little money, earned by painful toil, to secure some ampler 
 furnishing for their minds. They set us boys an example of hard 
 work, and inspired us with manly purpose. Some of them were 
 awkward and uncouth in manners, and slow in their mental proc- 
 esses, but they were for the most part thoroughly in earnest, and 
 gave a wholesome tone to the school. One thing, which I have 
 remarked in other country academies, was specially noticeable in 
 this, owing to the presence of so many students of mature years, 
 namely, a strong liking for the discussion of metaphysical and 
 theological questions. I fear that the light we had on such 
 questions was mainly darkness. 
 
 The best instruction in this, and, I think, in similar New 
 England academies of that day, was in mathematics. English 
 was taught by the profitless method of parsing Pope's " Essay 
 on Man," and even Pollock's " Course of Time." The ideals of 
 style which were cherished, whether in writing or speaking, were 
 seriously lacking in simplicity and directness. The sciences were 
 illustrated so far as the meager collection of apparatus and speci- 
 mens would permit. In the classics the method would not now 
 be regarded as sufficiently critical. Without being unduly delayed 
 by nice grammatical questions, we were encouraged to read on 
 as rapidly as we could. We pushed forward so briskly that we 
 soon caught the swing and the flow of the Virgilian verse, and 
 read the Mantuan bard with delight, in the last books at the 
 rate of three hundred lines a day. In this way, by the time I was 
 fourteen years old I had been carried in my studies considerably 
 beyond the requirements for admission to college, and yet I had 
 no definite purpose of going to college. And as I look back on 
 the work done in those now dead or moribund country academies 
 of New England, I must say that with all their defects they ren- 
 dered a service of inestimable value in their day. They supple- 
 
106 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 mented the work of the district schools, they furnished teachers 
 for those schools, they gave to many men a pretty good education 
 and a love of study which together enabled them to occupy in a 
 creditable manner responsible positions in state and in church. 
 I recall now the names of two of my fellow-pupils in the academy 
 who went directly from the school to the pulpit, and became 
 preachers of considerable distinction, while several others became 
 conspicuous in business and in political life. I speak of this 
 because I think I have noticed a disposition in our day, in prais- 
 ing justly the modern high-school, to fail somewhat in apprecia- 
 tion of what was accomplished by the old academy. 
 
 Some of my friends having fancied that I was endangering 
 my health by long and close application to study, it was decided 
 that I had best spend some time at work on my father's farm. 
 Accordingly, for two seasons, from early spring till late autumn, 
 I went to the field with the hired men, hoeing my row and mow- 
 ing my swath, and familiarizing myself thoroughly with all the 
 details of farmers' work. Much of this I had, of course, learned 
 before, in my vacations. I prize very highly the education I re- 
 ceived in those two years. I learned how much back-ache a dollar 
 earned in the field represents. From daily and close association 
 with the laboring men I learned how the world looked from their 
 point of view. Many a time subsequently, when tempted to grow 
 weary of my tasks in study, I remembered how much severer 
 were the fatigues and monotony of the work of the farmer's 
 boy, and addressed myself with fresh zeal to my labor. It is 
 certainly not a bad fortune, but a good fortune, for a boy at 
 some time to have known by experience what hard and con- 
 tinuous manual toil means. 
 
 After hesitating some time between seeking a clerkship in a 
 business establishment and accepting the generous offer of my 
 parents to send me to college, which they were scarcely able to 
 do, I decided to go to college. Conscious that my classics had 
 become rusty, I went for the larger part of a school year to the 
 University Grammar School in Providence, then under the charge 
 of Mr. Lyon, who still shares in the conduct of it, and of Mr. 
 Frieze, now the accomplished Professor of Latin in the Univer- 
 sity of Michigan. My studies were mainly in the classes of the 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 107 
 
 latter. Contact with, this inspiring teacher formed an epoch in 
 my intellectual life, as in that of many other, boys. He repre- 
 sented the best type of the modern teacher, at once critical as 
 a grammarian and stimulating with the finest appreciation of 
 "whatever was choicest in the classic masterpieces. At first, as 
 we were showered with questions such as I had never heard be- 
 fore, it seemed to me, although the reading of the Latin, at least, 
 was mainly a review to me, that I should never emerge from my 
 state of ignorance. But there was such a glow of enthusiasm 
 in the instructor and in the class, there was such delight in the 
 tension in which we were kept by the daily exercises, that no task 
 seemed too great to be encountered. Though we devoured the 
 Latin Grammar so that by the end of the year we could repeat 
 almost the whole of it, paradigms, rules, and exceptions, without 
 prompting, the work of mastering it did not seem onerous, for we 
 now felt how the increasing accuracy of our knowledge of the 
 structure of the language enhanced our enjoyment of the "Virgil 
 and the Cicero, whose subtile and less obvious charms we were 
 aided by our teacher to appreciate. The example set in that 
 school was instrumental in establishing the high standard of teach- 
 ing which a few schools in Providence have long maintained. 
 
 I entered Brown University in 1845. The college was under 
 the charge of a small but able Faculty, every member of which 
 was well fitted for his work, and gratefully do I acknowledge my 
 special obligations to each : to Dr. Caswell, whose gracious man- 
 ner made the thorny road of mathematics pleasant, even to those 
 who had little aptitude for the study, and whose serene wisdom 
 was a lamp to the feet of so many a student ; to the acute and 
 vigorous Chase, equally skillful in teaching the sciences and 
 philosophy ; to the critical Gammell, whose high ideals of style 
 were, if sometimes the despair, yet oftener the inspiration, of 
 youthful writers ; to those now renowned teachers of the classics, 
 Boise and Lincoln, who are still living in a green old age to re- 
 ceive the grateful tributes of the successive generations of their 
 pupils, and are still actively engaged in teaching ; and to Charles 
 C. Jewett and George "Washington Greene, who, in teaching 
 the modern languages, imparted to many something of their 
 own passion for letters. The robust personality of the presi- 
 
108 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 dent, Dr. Wayland, was felt throughout the whole life of the 
 institution. The discipline, which was administered exclu- 
 sively by him, was unnecessarily rigorous, the standard of 
 scholarship was high, the intellectual demands upon the students 
 were exacting. For those who attained high rank the life was a 
 strenuous one. The method pursued was specially calculated 
 to cultivate the powers of analysis and memory. Wherever the 
 subject permitted of such treatment, we were always required 
 to begin the recitation by giving an analysis of the discussion in 
 the text-book or the lecture. We were then expected to take up 
 point after point of the lesson and recite without being aided by 
 questions from the teacher. There was a general belief among 
 the students, though no formal statement to that effect was made 
 by the Faculty, that they would gain higher credits by repeating 
 the language of the book than by reporting the substance of the 
 thought in their own language. By dint of continued memoriz- 
 ing some of the students attained to a remarkable development 
 of the verbal memory. I think that nearly one-fourth of the men 
 in my class in their senior year used to learn in two hours — and 
 that after an indigestible dinner in Commons — fifteen pages of 
 Smyth's " Lectures on History," so that they could repeat them 
 with little variation from the text. The training in analysis was 
 of very high value in teaching men to seize and hold the main 
 points in an argument and to make points distinctly in the con- 
 struction of a discourse. On looking back, I think most of the 
 old students will agree that too much value was attached to 
 memoriter recitations. But none the less many of them have 
 found great advantage in life in the facility which they acquired 
 in retaining with accuracy what they read or write. The re- 
 action against training the memory has probably gone too far 
 in these later days. The natural sciences were taught as skillfully 
 as they well could be in an overcrowded curriculum, and in days 
 when laboratory methods were not employed. Personally I 
 gained great advantage by being permitted to assist the Professor 
 of Chemistry two years, in preparing the experiments which he 
 made before the class. In the ancient languages, certainly in 
 Greek, I think the professors who taught us would now say too 
 much time was given to grammatical and philological detail and 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 109 
 
 too little to rapid reading. But their method was then generally 
 in vogue, and the teaching was excellent of its kind. 
 
 To nearly every student the most important event in his 
 college life in those days was the contact with the vigorous and 
 suggestive mind of Dr. Wayland, in the senior classroom, and 
 especially during the study of moral philosophy. It is difficult 
 for those who know Dr. Wayland only by his writings, valuable 
 as some of them are, to understand how he made so deep an im- 
 pression on his pupils. In truth, he was a man far greater than 
 his published works. He was not a great scholar ; he was im- 
 perious, sometimes prejudiced ; but his mind was singularly 
 penetrating and lucid. He had in a wonderful degree two gifts 
 of a great teacher, the power of analyzing a subject and the 
 power of simple and happy illustration. He insisted on the 
 clearest and sharpest definition of terms before answering a ques- 
 tion or engaging in a discussion, and thus often made the in- 
 quirer answer his own question by an accurate definition, or 
 rendered the discussion superfluous. Withal, he had the keenest 
 wit and a thorough knowledge of men, especially of students. 
 He had the happiest way, often a homely way, of stating an im- 
 portant truth so that it remained forever fixed in the mind of 
 the hearer. There was too, beyond all this, a certain power of 
 personal presence, a force of character, a moral strength, which 
 lent a tremendous weight to even his commonest words. I have 
 met in my day not a few distinguished men ; but I recall none 
 who have so impressed me with their power of personality, none 
 who have uttered so many wise words which I recall every week 
 to my advantage and help in the duties of my daily life. He was a 
 very inapt pupil who passed from under Dr. Wayland's instruc- 
 tion without catching something of his catholic spirit, his passion- 
 ate love of soul-liberty, and his earnest Christian principle. 
 
 But to us country boys, as we entered upon college life, 
 nothing was more fascinating and more novel and more helpful 
 than the access to well -furnished libraries, and the society of 
 students of marked ability and scholarly enthusiasm. The boys 
 who are reared in the neighborhood of libraries can have no 
 appreciation of the sensations which we country lads, whose 
 supply of books had been the most meager imaginable, but 
 
110 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 whose thirst for reading was insatiable, experienced in being 
 ushered into a large library and told that all these books were 
 now at our service. I sometimes tremble to think what an on- 
 slaught we made upon the crowded shelves. Fortunately, as- 
 sociation with older students soon helped us learn how and 
 what to read. For there was at that time — and, I hope, always 
 — in Brown a profound interest in literary culture. The stu- 
 dents, with few exceptions, lodged in the dormitories, and took 
 their meals in Commons Hall. They went little into society 
 in the city. They were thus drawn very close to each other. 
 The enthusiasm of the more gifted and accomplished scholars 
 was caught in some degree by nearly all. I remember that 
 men were divided as Carlyleists or anti-Carlyleists, Coleridge- 
 ians or anti-Coleridgeians, and so on, and that literary, historic, 
 and philosophic theories were as hotly discussed as the cur- 
 rent political questions of the day. Not wishing to be un- 
 duly laudator temporis acii, I am sure that whoever examines 
 the triennial catalogue of Brown for the years from 1845 to 
 1852 will see that the college contained within its walls in those 
 years a good number, perhaps an exceptionally large number, of 
 men whose lives have shown that it must have been a high 
 privilege to be intimately associated with them in the compan- 
 ionship of student life. The society of some of them has been 
 one of the chief factors in my own education, both in college 
 and afterward, and one of the chief delights of life. On the 
 whole, I think that any student in Brown University who did 
 not graduate in those days with a mind well disciplined for 
 entering upon any worthy career, was himself greatly at fault. 
 
 During the next three or four years, having been prevented 
 by an affection of the throat from studying for one of the profes- 
 sions, I " was educated " mainly by a year of service as assistant 
 in the college library, by a journey on horseback through the 
 southern States, by some months' experience as a student and 
 assistant in the office of the City Engineer of Boston (mainly 
 engaged on the Cochituate water-works), and by a residence of 
 nearly two years in France, Italy, and Germany. Most of the 
 time while abroad I was studying to prepare myself for the 
 chair of Modern Languages in Brown University, the choice 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. Ill 
 
 between which chair and the chair of Civil Engineering was 
 offered me soon after my arrival in Europe. Of the varied 
 charms and stimulations, of the broadening of the intellectual 
 horizon, of the enriching of the whole mental life, " the ampler 
 ether and diviner air," which study in the Old World and 
 especially at the great universities brings to the young Amer- 
 ican, I cannot here adequately speak. 
 
 At this point, with my assumption of the chair of Modern 
 Languages in Brown University, in 1853, I suppose this sketch 
 is expected to close. Otherwise I should be tempted to add a 
 few words concerning one of the main factors in my later educa- 
 tion, my experience as editor of the Providence " Daily Journal " 
 from 1860 to 1866. But, after all, how little can one tell of his 
 real education, and how much that is best in it lies this side of 
 school and of college ! 
 
ELEVENTH PAPER. 
 By ANDREW D. WHITE. 
 
 "When an ill-inspired official sprinkled Lempriere's " Classical 
 Dictionary " over central New York, there fell to a beautiful valley 
 upon the head-waters of the Susquehanna the name of Homer. 
 Hither came, toward the end of the last century, a body of 
 sturdy young New Englanders, and among them my grand- 
 fathers and grandmothers. Their first public care was a church, 
 their second a schooL This school was speedily developed into 
 Cortland Academy ; students came from far and near, and it soon 
 began sending young men into the foremost places of State and 
 Church. At an early day, too, it began receiving young women 
 and sending them forth to become the best of matrons. 
 
 Though I was never within its walls as a student, this schoor 
 acted powerfully upon my early education in two ways. It 
 educated my mother, and it spread through that region an 
 atmosphere of respect for education and culture. The library 
 and collections, though small, suggested pursuits better than the 
 scramble for place or pelf; the public exercises led men's 
 thoughts, no matter how vaguely, into higher regions. I shall 
 never forget the awe which came over me when, as a child, I 
 saw Principal Woolworth, with his best students around him, 
 making astronomical observations through a small telescope. 
 Then began my education into that great truth, so imperfectly 
 as yet understood in our country, that stores, hotels, shops, 
 facilities for travel and traffic, are not the highest things in 
 civilization. 
 
 Influences more direct came from a primary school. To this 
 I was taken, when three years old, for a reason which may strike 
 the present generation as curious. The servant who had charge 
 of me wished to learn to read ; so she slipped into the school, 
 and took me with her. As a result, though my memory runs 
 back distinctly to events near the beginning of my fourth year, 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 113 
 
 it holds not the faintest recollection of my learning to read, 
 or of a time when I could not read easily. The only studies 
 which I recall with distinctness, as carried on before my 
 seventh year, are arithmetic and geography. As to the former, 
 the multiplication-table was learned by rote and chanted in 
 chorus by the whole body of children, a rhythmical and varied 
 movement of the arms being carried on at the same time. I re- 
 member only that this exercise gave us all great pleasure, and 
 fastened the tables into my mind forever. As to geography, that 
 gave pleasure in another way : the text-book contained pictures ; 
 these stimulated my imagination and prompted me to read on 
 the subjects to which they referred. 
 
 There was no over-pressure. Mental recreation was obtained 
 in a loose way from the " Eollo " books, the " Parley " books, 
 "Sandford and Merton," the "Children's Magazine," and the 
 like. Of physical recreation there was plenty in the fields and 
 woods. 
 
 In my eighth year the family removed to Syracuse, a town 
 which then had about five thousand inhabitants. After much 
 time lost in various poor schools, I was sent to the preparatory 
 department of the Syracuse Academy, and there, by good luck, 
 found Joseph A. Allen, the best teacher of English branches I 
 have ever known. He had no rules and no system ; or, rather, 
 his rule was to have no rules, and his system was to have no 
 system. To most teachers this might have been fatal ; but he 
 had genius. He seemed to divine the character and enter into 
 the purpose of every boy. Work under him was a pleasure. 
 His methods were very simple. Great attention was given 
 to reading aloud from a book made up of selections from the 
 best authors, and to recitals from these. Thus I stored up not 
 only some of the best things in the older English writers, but 
 inspiring poems of Whittier, Longfellow, and other moderns. I 
 only regret that more of the same sort was not done. I recall, 
 among treasures thus gained, which have been precious to me 
 ever since, in many a weary or sleepless hour on land and sea, ex- 
 tracts from Shakespeare, parts of Milton's "Samson Agonistes" 
 and of his sonnets, Gray's " Elegy," Byron's " Ode to the Ocean," 
 Campbell's "What's Hallowed Ground? " Goldsmith's "Deserted 
 
114 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 Village," Longfellow's " Psalm of Life," Irving's " Voyage to 
 Europe," and parts of Webster's reply to Hayne. 
 
 At this school the wretched bugbear of English spelling was 
 dealt with by a method that, so long as our present monstrous 
 orthography continues, seems to me the best possible. During 
 the last half-hour of every day, each scholar was required to 
 have before him a copy-book, of which each page was divided 
 into two columns. At the head of the first column was the 
 word " Spelling ; " at the head of the second column was the 
 word "Corrected." The teacher then gave out to the school 
 about twenty of the more important words in the reading-lesson 
 of the day, and, as he thus dictated each word, each scholar wrote 
 it in the column headed " Spelling." When all the words were 
 thus written, the first scholar was asked to spell from his book 
 the first word. If misspelled it was passed to the next, and so 
 on until it was spelled correctly, whereupon all who had made a 
 mistake in writing it wrote the correct spelling in the opposite 
 column. The result of this was that the greater part of us 
 learned orthography thoroughly and practically ; for the practical 
 use of spelling comes in writing. 
 
 As to mathematics, arithmetic was pushed, perhaps, too far 
 into puzzles ; but geometry was made fascinating by showing its 
 real applications and the beauty of its reasoning. It is the only 
 mathematical study I ever loved. In natural science, though 
 most of the apparatus of schools nowadays was wanting, Mr. 
 Allen's instruction was far beyond his time. Never shall I for- 
 get my excited interest when, occasionally, a surgeon of the vil- 
 lage came in, and the whole school was assembled to see him 
 dissect the eye or ear or heart of an ox. Physics, as then under- 
 stood, was studied in a text-book, and there was illustration by 
 ordinary apparatus, which fastened firmly in my mind the main 
 facts and principles. 
 
 The only mistake in Mr. Allen's teaching was too much at- 
 tention to English grammar. The true order ought to be, liter- 
 ature first, and grammar afterward. Perhaps there is no more 
 tiresome trifling in the world for boys and girls than rote recita- 
 tions and parsing from one of the usual grammatical text-books. 
 
 As to physical development, every reasonable encouragement 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 115 
 
 was given to play, Mr. Allen going frequently upon the play- 
 grounds. He was also an excellent musician, and a most help- 
 ful influence was exerted by singing, which was a daily ex- 
 ercise of the school. I then began taking lessons regularly in 
 music, and became proficient enough to play the organ occasion- 
 ally in church. The best result of this training was to give my 
 life one of its deepest and purest pleasures. 
 
 As to the moral side, Mr. Allen influenced many of us 
 strongly by liberalizing and broadening our horizon. He was a 
 disciple at that time of Channing, and an abolitionist ; but he 
 never made any speeches on the subject — certainly never made 
 the slightest attempt to proselyte any of his students. Yet the 
 very atmosphere of the school made sectarian bigotry and nar- 
 rowness impossible. 
 
 But Mr. Allen's was an English department, and, as I was to 
 go to college, I was removed to a classical school. This school 
 was not at first very successful. Its classical teacher was a good 
 scholar, but careless. Under him, I repeated the rules in Latin 
 and Greek glibly, for term after term, without really understand- 
 ing the practical value of the cases, or what was meant by one 
 word " governing " another. His great mistake, which seems to 
 me not an infrequent one, was taking it for granted that repeat- 
 ing rules and forms means understanding them. He was suc- 
 ceeded by H , at present an eminent Presbyterian divine and 
 
 professor in a Southern university. He was one of the noblest 
 and truest of men, and his manly, moral influence over his 
 scholars was remarkable. Many of them have reached positions 
 of commanding usefulness, and I think they will agree that his 
 influence upon their lives was most happy. The only drawback 
 was that he was still very young, not yet through his senior year 
 in Union College, and his methods in classical teaching were 
 imperfect. He loved his classics, and taught his better students 
 to love them ; but he was neither thorough in grammar nor a 
 sure guide at all times in translation, as I afterward found to my 
 
 sorrow. My friend and schoolmate of that time, W. O. S , 
 
 published, a few years since, in the " St. Nicholas," an account 
 of this school. The picture he there gave was somewhat 
 idealized, but we doubtless agree in thinking that the want in 
 
116 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 grammatical drill was more than made up by the love of manli- 
 ness and the dislike of meanness which was in those days our 
 very atmosphere. 
 
 As to education outside of the school, very important to me 
 was the discovery of " The Monastery, by the author of "Waver- 
 ley." Who the "author of Waverley " was I neither knew nor 
 cared, but read the book three times in a sort of fascination. Un- 
 fortunately, novels and romances were kept locked up as unfit 
 reading for children, and it was long before I reveled in the other 
 novels of Scott. That they would have been thoroughly good 
 and wholesome reading for me I know. Then and later they 
 opened a new world to me, and gave healthful play to my imag- 
 ination. At that time, too, I read and re-read, with a sort of 
 " awful joy," Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress/' and still later, with 
 intense pleasure, the earlier works of Dickens. My only regret 
 as regards that time is that, between the rather trashy " boys' 
 books " on the one side and the rather severe books in the family 
 library on the other, I read far less of really good literature than 
 I might easily have done. My reading was absolutely without 
 a guide, hence fitful and scrappy, parts of Kollin's 'Ancient 
 History " and Lander's " Travels in Africa " being mixed up with 
 " Robinson Crusoe " and " The Scottish Chiefs." Much reflection 
 on my experience has convinced me that some kindly direction in 
 the reading of a fairly scholarly boy is of the utmost importance, 
 and never more so than now, when there are so many books press- 
 ing for attention. I should lay much stress, also, on the hearing 
 of good literature well read, and the interspersing of such reading 
 with some remarks by the reader, pointing out the main beauties* 
 of the pieces thus presented. 
 
 About my tenth year occurred an event, apparently trivial, 
 but really very important in my mental development. My 
 father brought home one day, as a " center-table book," a hand- 
 some quarto called " The Gallery of British Artists." It con- 
 tained engravings from pictures by Turner, Stanfield, Catter- 
 mole, and others, mainly representing scenes from Scott's 
 novels, and picturesque old towns in France and Italy. Of 
 this book I never tired. It aroused in me an intense desire to 
 know more of the subjects represented, and this desire has led 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 117 
 
 me since to visit and to study every cathedral church and town- 
 hall of any historical or architectural significance in Europe, 
 outside of the Spanish peninsula. But, far more important, 
 it led me to read and re-read all of Scott's novels, and espe- 
 cially the one which I always thought the most fascinating — 
 " Quentin Durward." This novel led me later, not merely to 
 visit Liege and Orleans, Clery and Tours, but to devour the 
 chroniclers and historians who dealt with that period, and 
 finally to become deeply interested in historical studies, and to 
 learn how great principles lie hidden beneath the surface of 
 events. The first of these I ever clearly discerned was upon 
 reading " Quentin Durward " and " Anne of Geierstein," and 
 finding revealed in them the secret of the centralization of 
 power in Europe, and the triumph of monarchy over feudalism. 
 
 In my fifteenth and sixteenth years another element entered 
 into my education. Syracuse, as the central city of the State, 
 was the scene of many conventions and public meetings. It was 
 a time of very deep earnestness in political matters. The last 
 great efforts were making, by the more radical, to prevent the 
 extension of slavery, and by the more conservative, to secure 
 the preservation of the Union. The former of these efforts in- 
 terested me most. There were at Syracuse frequent public de- 
 bates between various groups of the antislavery party, repre- 
 sented by such men as Gerrit Smith, Wendell Phillips, William 
 Lloyd Garrison, John Parker Hale, Samuel Joseph May, and 
 Frederick Douglass. They took strong hold upon me, and 
 gave me a higher idea of a man's best work in life. That was 
 the bloom period, too, of the old lecture system. It was the 
 time when lectures were expected to build character and in- 
 crease knowledge. The sensation and buffoon business, which 
 destroyed the system, had not come in. I remember, and feel to 
 this hour, the good influences of lectures then heard in the old 
 city-hall at Syracuse, from President Mark Hopkins, Bishop 
 Alonzo Potter, Senator Hale of New Hampshire, Emerson, 
 Whipple, and others. 
 
 In my seventeenth year came a trial. My father had taken 
 
 a leading part in establishing a parish school for St. Paul's 
 
 Church, in Syracuse, in accordance with the high church views 
 8 
 
118 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 of the rector, Br. Gregory, and there was finally called to the 
 mastership a young candidate for orders. He was a brilliant 
 scholar and a charming man, and it has not surprised those who 
 knew him then to see him become one of the most highly 
 esteemed among the younger bishops of the Protestant Epis- 
 copal Church. To him I was sent for my final preparation be- 
 fore leaving for college. I had always intended to enter one of 
 the larger New England universities ; but my teacher, yielding 
 to his strong church feeling and his natural love for his alma 
 mater, induced my father to insist on placing me at a small 
 Protestant Episcopal college in western New York. I went 
 most reluctantly. There were in the faculty several excellent 
 men, one of whom afterward became a colleague of my own in 
 Cornell University, and proved of the greatest value to that in- 
 stitution. Unfortunately, we, of the lower classes, could have 
 very little instruction from him. Still, we had some good in- 
 struction from others ; the tutor in Greek was one of the best 
 scholars I have ever known. 
 
 But the college, as a whole, was at its lowest ebb. There 
 were but about forty students, and the great majority of these, 
 sons of wealthy churchmen, felt no inclination for work, and 
 much inclination to dissipation. Of discipline, there was none. 
 The authorities of the college could not afford to expel or even 
 offend a student. Its endowment was so small that it must have 
 all the instruction fees possible, and must keep in the good 
 graces of the wealthy fathers of its scapegrace students. The 
 students soon found this out, and the result was a little pande- 
 monium. Only about half a dozen of our number studied at all ; 
 the rest, by translations, promptings, and evasions of various 
 sorts, escaped without labor. I have had to do since, as student 
 or professor, with some half-dozen large universities, at home 
 and abroad ; and, in all of these together, I have not seen so much 
 carousing and wild dissipation as I then saw in this little church 
 college, of which the especial boast was that, being small, it was 
 " able to exercise a direct Christian influence upon its students." 
 
 At the close of the year I determined to try for something 
 better ; and, as my father was determined to have me remain at 
 the little college, I made a coup d'etat. Braving the censure of 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 119 
 
 family and friends, I deliberately left college, and took refuge 
 
 with my old instructor, P , who had prepared me for college 
 
 at Syracuse, but who was now the principal of the academy at 
 Moravia, near the head of Owasco Lake, some fifty miles dis- 
 tant. Of the struggle and the sorrow it cost me thus to defy 
 the wishes of those dearest to me there is no need to speak, 
 further than to say that it made me determine to atone for 
 my disobedience by severe and systematic work. I began 
 labor in earnest, by reviewing my mathematics and classics, and 
 by a course of reading which had great influence on my after 
 studies. Among my books was D' Aubigne's " History of the 
 Eeformation." Its deficiencies were not of a sort to harm me; 
 its vigor and enthusiasm gave me a great impulse. I not only 
 read, but studied it, and followed it with every other book on 
 the same subject that I could find. No reading ever did a 
 man more good. It not only strengthened and deepened my 
 better purposes, but it continued powerfully the impulse given 
 me by my reading of the historical novels of Scott, and led 
 directly to my devoting myself to the study and teaching of 
 modern history. 
 
 In January, 1851, I entered the sophomore class of Yale 
 College — and never was man more disappointed at first. The 
 president and professors were, indeed, men of the highest 
 character and attainments, and the students were under far 
 better discipline than at the little college from which I had 
 come. But to the lower classes the instruction was given 
 mainly by tutors, who took up teaching for bread-winning, be- 
 fore going into the ministry. Naturally, most of the work done 
 under them was perfunctory. There was too much " reciting " 
 by rote, and too little real intercourse between teacher and 
 taught. The instructor sat in a box, heard students' transla- 
 tions without indicating anything better, and their answers to 
 questions without making suggestions or remarks. 
 
 In the junior year, matters improved somewhat : but, though 
 the professors were most of them really distinguished men, and 
 one, at least, a scholar who at Berlin or Leipzig would have 
 drawn throngs of students from all Christendom, they were fet- 
 tered by " the system," which made much of " gerund-grinding " 
 
120 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 and little of literature as such. I do not feel called upon here 
 to repeat the more extended criticisms made by me, as one of its 
 former editors, in the " Yale Literary Magazine," last year. 
 
 In the senior year, the influence of President Woolsey and 
 Professor Porter was strong for good. Though " the system " 
 fettered them somewhat, their personality broke through it. 
 
 Very important in my intellectual development, at this time, 
 was my intercourse with my fellow-students. I cannot ascribe 
 quite so much to them as Dr. Edward Everett Hale does, in his 
 contribution to this series; but I ascribe much. Talk with 
 them was of very great value, and some of my best impulses 
 and suggestions to reading came from them. 
 
 Valuable to me also was my membership in sundry college 
 societies, and especially in a senior club, in which off-hand dis- 
 cussions of subjects literary and political were peculiarly useful. 
 
 It was my fortune to secure sundry prizes offered for es- 
 says ; among them, the First Clark Prize, the Yale Literary 
 Prize, and the De Forest Prize. The history of this latter 
 success may serve to show certain ways in which influence 
 can be exerted powerfully upon a young man. As regards 
 the subject, it was suggested by hearing Edwin Forrest in 
 Bulwer's drama of "Kichelieu." The character of the great 
 cardinal, the greatest statesman that France has produced, 
 made a deep impression upon me, and suggested the subjects 
 in both the Yale Literary and the De Forest competitions, giv- 
 ing me not only the initial impulse, but maintaining that in- 
 terest in the work to which the result was largely due. 
 Another spur to success was even more effective. I one day 
 received a telegram from my father, asking me to meet him in 
 New York. I did so, and passed an hour with him, all the time 
 at a loss to know why he had sent for me. As I was leaving 
 the hotel to return to New Haven, he said, " By the way, there 
 is still another prize, the largest of all, to be competed for." 
 "Yes," I answered, " the De Forest ; but I have little chance for 
 that ; for, though I may be one of the six Townsend prize men 
 admitted to the competition, there are other speakers so much 
 better that I have little hope of taking it." He gave me rather 
 a scornful look, and said very impressively : " If I were one of 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 121 
 
 the first six competitors, in a class of over a hundred men, I 
 should try very hard to be the first one." He said nothing more 
 except good-by. On my way to New Haven I thought much of 
 this, and, on arriving, went to an elocutionist and engaged him 
 for a course of vocal gymnastics. When he wished me to re- 
 cite my oration before him, I declined, saying that it must be 
 spoken in my own way, not in his ; that his way might be better, 
 but that mine was my own, and I would have no other. He con- 
 fined himself, therefore, to a course of vocal gymnastics alone, 
 and the result was a surprise to myself and all my friends. 
 My voice, from being weak and hollow, became round, strong, 
 and flexible. I then went to a student in the class above my 
 own, a natural and forcible speaker, and made an arrangement 
 with him to hear me pronounce my oration, and to criticise it in 
 a common-sense way. This he did. At passages where he 
 thought my method wrong, he raised his finger, gave me an imi- 
 tation of my own manner, then gave the passage in the way he 
 thought best, and allowed me to choose between his and mine. 
 The result was that at the public competition I was successful. 
 This experience taught me what I conceive to be the true theory 
 of elocutionary training in our universities : vocal gymnastics 
 on one side, common-sense criticism on the other. 
 
 These reminiscences ought not to close without reference 
 to my physical education in college. With a constitution far 
 from robust, there was need of special care in this respect. 
 Fortunately, I took to boating. In an eight-oared boat, spinning 
 
 down the harbor or up the river, with G. W. S at the stroke 
 
 — as earnest and determined in the " Undine," then, as in the 
 London office of the " New York Tribune," now — every condition 
 was satisfied for bodily exercise and mental recreation. I can- 
 not refrain from mentioning that our club then sent the first 
 challenge to row that ever passed between Yale and Harvard, 
 even though I am obliged to confess that we were soundly 
 beaten ; but neither that defeat at Lake Quinsigamond, nor the 
 many absurdities which have grown out of such competitions 
 since, have prevented my remaining an apostle of college boating 
 from that day to this. If guarded by common-sense rules, en- 
 forced with firmness by college faculties, it gives the maximum 
 
122 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 of healthful exercise with a minimum of danger. The most 
 detestable product of college life is the sickly cynic; and a 
 thorough course of boating, under a good stroke oar, does as 
 much as anything to make him impossible. 
 
 At the close of my life at Yale, I went abroad for nearly 
 three years. Fortunately, for this part of my education I had 
 
 one of the best of companions, my college-mate D. C. G , 
 
 who was then, as he has been since, a source of good inspira- 
 tions to me, especially in the formation of my ideas regarding 
 education. My first year, after a few weeks' sight-seeing in 
 England, was mainly spent in Paris. There I settled down in 
 the family of a very intelligent French professor, and remained 
 seven months. Not a word of English was spoken in the 
 family ; and, with the daily lesson in a French method, and lect- 
 ures at the Sorbonne and College de France, the new language 
 soon became familiar. The lectures then heard strengthened 
 my conception of what a university should be. Among my 
 professors were such men as Laboulaye, St. Marc Girardin, and 
 Arnould. In connection with the lecture-room work, my studies 
 in modern history were continued, especially by reading Thierry, 
 Mignet, Thiers, Chateaubriand, and other historians, besides 
 hearing various masterpieces in French dramatic literature, as 
 given at the Theatre Frangais, where Eachel was then in her 
 glory, and at the Odeon, where Mademoiselle Georges, who had 
 begun her career under the first Napoleon, was ending it with 
 splendor under Napoleon the Third. 
 
 But my favorite subject of study was the French Revolution, 
 and, in the intervals of reading and lectures, I sought out not 
 only the spots noted in its history, but the men who had taken 
 part in it. At the Hotel des Invalides I talked with old sol- 
 diers, veterans of the wars of the Eepublic and of Napoleon, 
 discussing with them the events through which they had passed ; 
 and at various other places and times with civilians who had 
 heard orations at the Jacobin and Cordelier clubs, and had seen 
 the guillotine at work. The most interesting of my old soldiers 
 at the Invalides wore upon his breast the cross of the Legion of 
 Honor, which he had received from Napoleon at Austerlitz ; and 
 the most interesting of my civilian acquaintances described to 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 123 
 
 me how, as a schoolboy, he saw Napoleon beside his camp-fire, 
 at Cannes, just after his landing from Elba. 
 
 Toward the close of this year, with a college classmate, I 
 employed my vacation in long walks and drives through north- 
 ern, western, and central France, including Picardy, Normandy, 
 Brittany, and Touraine, visiting the spots of most historic and 
 architectural interest. At this time, too, I made, at the request 
 of Mr. Eandall, the biographer of Jefferson, some search in the 
 French archives for correspondence between Jefferson and 
 Robespierre ; and, though the effort was in vain, it served to ini- 
 tiate me into that sort of research. 
 
 At the close of this stay in France, by the kindness of the 
 American Minister to Russia, Governor Seymour, of Connecticut, 
 I was invited to St. Petersburg as an attache of the American 
 Legation, residing in his household. It was a most interesting 
 period. The Crimean War was going on, and the death of the 
 Emperor Nicholas, during my stay, enabled me to see how a 
 great change in autocratic administration is accomplished. My 
 main work, as regards the legation, was as an interpreter, and it 
 was my duty, in this capacity, to accompany the minister not only 
 at court, but in his interviews with Nesselrode, Gortchakoff, and 
 others then in power. This gave me some chance to make my 
 historical studies real by close observation of a certain sort of 
 men, who have had the making of far too much of history. But 
 books interested me none the less. An epoch in my life was 
 made by reading Guizot's " History of Civilization in France," 
 for it greatly deepened and strengthened the impressions made 
 by his " History of Civilization in Europe," as read under Dr. 
 Woolsey, at Yale. During those seven months in St. Peters- 
 burg and Moscow, I read much in modern European history, 
 paying considerable attention to the political development and 
 condition of Russia, and for the first time learned the pleasures 
 of investigation into the history of our own country. Governor 
 Seymour was especially devoted to the ideas of Thomas Jeffer- 
 son, and late at night, as we sat before the fire, on returning from 
 festivities or business interviews, he would bring on a discussion 
 of the democratic system, as advocated by Jefferson, compared 
 with the autocratic system, as we saw it from the capital of the 
 
124 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 czar. The result was that my beginning of real study in Amer- 
 ican history was made by a very close examination of the life 
 and writings of Thomas Jefferson, including his letters, messages, 
 and other papers, and of the diplomatic history revealed in the 
 volumes of correspondence preserved in the legation. The gen- 
 eral result was to strengthen and deepen my democratic creed, 
 and a special result was the preparation of an article on " Jeffer- 
 son and Slavery," which, having been refused by the " New 
 Englander," at New Haven, on account of its too pronounced 
 sympathy with democracy against federalism, was published by 
 the " Atlantic Monthly," and led to some acquaintances of much 
 value to me afterward. 
 
 Eeturning from St. Petersburg, I was matriculated at the 
 University of Berlin, and entered the family of a very intelligent 
 gymnasial professor, where nothing but German was spoken. 
 During this stay at Berlin, in the years 1855-6, I heard the lect- 
 ures of Lepsius, August Boeckh, Carl Eitter, Friedrich von 
 Raumer, and others. The lectures of Ranke I could not follow. 
 He had a habit of becoming so absorbed in his subject as to slip 
 down in his chair, hold his finger up toward the ceiling, and 
 then, with his eye fastened on the tip of it, go mumbling through 
 a kind of rhapsody, which most of my German fellow -students 
 confessed they could not understand It was a comical sight : 
 half a dozen students crowding around his desk listening to the 
 professor, as priests might listen to the sibyl on her tripod, the 
 other students being scattered through the room in various stages 
 of discouragement. My studies at this period were mainly in 
 the direction of history, though with some reading on art and 
 literature. Valuable and interesting to me, at this time, were 
 the representations of the best dramas of Goethe, Schiller, and 
 Lessing, at the Berlin theater. Then, too, really began my 
 education in Shakespeare: the representations of his plays (in 
 Tieck's version) were, on the whole, the most satisfactory I have 
 ever known. 
 
 At the close of this stay in Berlin, I went, with a party of 
 fellow-students, through Austria to Italy. During the whole of 
 the journey it was my exceeding good fortune to be thrown into 
 very close relations with two of the party, both of whom became 
 
HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 125 
 
 eminent Latin professors, and one of whom, Dr. Henry S. Frieze, 
 from his lecture-room in the University of Michigan, as a center, 
 has done more than any other man within my knowledge to 
 make classical scholarship a means of culture throughout our 
 "Western States. My excursions in Rome, under such guidance, 
 I have always looked upon as one of the fortunate things of life. 
 The day was given to exploration, the evening to discussion, not 
 merely of archaeological theories, but of the weightier matters 
 pertaining to the history of Roman civilization and its influence. 
 Dear Frieze and Fishburne ! How vividly come back the days 
 in the tower of the Croce di Malta, at Genoa, and in our sky- 
 parlor of the Piazzi di Spagna, at Rome, when we held " high 
 debate " on " the resemblance of the Roman power to the Brit- 
 ish," and kindred subjects. 
 
 An episode of much importance to me, at this time, was 
 meeting at Naples our American Minister at that court, Robert 
 Dale Owen. His talks on the political state of Italy, and his 
 pictures of the monstrous despotism of " King Bomba," took 
 strong hold of me. Not even the vivid pages of Colletta or of 
 Settembrini have done so much to arouse in me a sense of the 
 moral value of political history. 
 
 These studies were followed up by excursions among the old 
 cities of southern France, which give a far better conception of 
 that wonderful Roman power than can be obtained in Italy 
 alone. At this period, too, my education, on the aesthetic side, 
 was further developed by the study of art in its various phases, 
 but, above all, of architecture, as displayed in cathedrals and 
 town-halls. 
 
 In 1856 I returned, and met my class, assembled to take 
 their masters' degrees in course, at Yale. Then came the turn- 
 ing-point in my whole education. I had been for some time 
 uneasy because the way did not seem clear before me ; but at 
 this Yale Commencement of 1856, while lounging with my 
 classmates in the college yard, I heard some one say that 
 President Wayland, of Brown University, was speaking in the 
 Alumni Hall. Going to the door, I looked within, and saw 
 upon the platform an old man, heavy -browed, with spectacles 
 resting upon the top of his head. Just at that moment he said, 
 
126 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 
 
 very impressively, that in his opinion the best field of work for 
 graduates was in the "West ; that the country was shortly to 
 arrive at " a switching-oil place " toward good or evil ; that the 
 West was to hold the balance of power, and to determine 
 whether the country should prove a blessing or a curse in 
 human history ; and he upheld the claims of the West upon the 
 best work of college men. 
 
 I had never seen him before ; I never saw him afterward. 
 His speech lasted, perhaps, ten minutes ; but it settled a great 
 question for me. I went home, wrote to sundry friends that I 
 was a candidate for the professorship of history in any Western 
 college where there was a chance to get at students ; and re- 
 ceived two calls, one to a Southern university, which I could 
 not accept on account of my anti slavery opinions, the other to 
 the University of Michigan, which I accepted. My old Yale 
 friends were kind enough to tender me a position for the build- 
 ing up of their school of art ; but my belief was in the value of 
 historical studies. The words of Wayland rang in my ears, and 
 I went to the University of Michigan. The work there was a 
 joy to me from first to last. My relations with my students of 
 that period, before I had become distracted from them by the 
 cares of an executive position, were among the most delightful 
 of my life. And then began, perhaps, the most real part of 
 my education. I learned the meaning of the proverb, Docendo 
 disces. I found active, energetic Western men in my classes, 
 ready to discuss historical questions ; and I found that, in order 
 to keep up my part of such discussions and class-room duties, I 
 must work as I had never worked before. The education I re- 
 ceived from my classes at the University of Michigan was 
 perhaps the most useful of all. 
 
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