UC-NRLF iiiii ♦B 77b 513 LIBRARY OF THE University of California GIFT OF GEORGE MOREY RICHARDSON. Received, August, i8g8. (^Accession No . 7^^^^ Class No . . - i^.fcf^fc^.^j^^-j^.h?^fc;^h?^j^j^Jii^^ tf^ I [30 as. THE "Howl was Educated Papers n From the Forum Magazine D, Apple ton tS Co.^ New York THE HISTORICAL REFERENCE-BOOK, COMPRISING: A Chronological Table of Universal History, a Chronological Liciion- ary of Universal History, a Biographical Dictionary. WITH GEOGRAPHICAL NOTES. FOR THE USE OF STUDENTS, TEAOIIEKS, AND HEADERS. By LOUIS HEILPRIN. New edition. Crown 8vo. Half leather, $3.00. " A second revised edition of Mr. Louis Heilprin's.- 'Historical Reference-Book ' lias just appealed, marking the well-earned success of this admirable work — a dictionary of dates, a .dictionary, of events: (with a special gazetteer .for the places mentioned), and a eonei.se biographical dictionary, all in one, and all, in the highest degree trustworthy. Mr, Ileilprin's revision is as thorough as his originaLwork. Any one can test it by running over the list of pei^sons deceased «ince this manual first appeared, Corrections, too, have been made, as we can testify in one irBtance at least."— -A>w York Kveidng Pod. " One of the most complete, compact, and valuable works of refbrericc yet produced." — 7Vo/y Daily Times. "• Unequaled in its field." — Boston. Courier. '' A small libi-ary-in itself."— CZf/c^^o Dial. ''An invaluable book of reifcrence, useful alike to the student and the general reader. The arrangement- corrld scarcely be better orinore convenient "—Agz/? York Ihrald. "The conspectus ofthc world!s history presented iii the first part of the book is as full as the wisest tei'seness could put within ihe spkce."^ I /iila.delphia.Atncrlca)i. " We miss liardly anything that we shoulgi consider desirable, and \Vc have not been al)le to detect a single mistake or misprint."— x\ Wo York X-cUiou. " So far a5 we have tested the accuracy of the present work we have found it without tlaw."-^C7n*is^^"fin Union: • • "■.• - '■'The conspicuous. merits of. the work are oon^ensatiou and accuracy. These points alone .should suffice to give the. 'Historical Refererfisfe-3*>ok '-a plabe in every public and piivate library." — Boston Bcacdn. ' -"*'"'.■.. ''Tlie method of the tabulation is admirable for ready rt'fei'ence.'". — X^w York Home JohvimJ. ' ■ ' '' '- '' Thii* cyclopiedia of condensed knoAyledge is a work that will spaciliiy become a neces- .si:y to the general reader, as well as .to the student."— i><2/ro^^i'rec/^r<'s^^ *• For clertrness, correctness, and the readiness with which the reader xaii find the iii- f.H-mation of whiiJh he^is in search, the volume is far. in advance x)f auy work of its kind with which we are acquainted.": — Boston Sat^inlai/ hJvcninff^ Gdzetle. , ' , " The latest date? have been given. The gco'iraphieal not^s iWicli accompunrj the /iis- turicaf inddnif^ arc a nov^^l cidditio)t^ (tnd/*x:ret4infflij lieli>ful. The size also commends it, making- it convenieiit fo^ con.staiU u-efercnce,.. while the three divisions and careful elimination of minor and unintei-esting incidents make it ranch ensier to find dates and events about which a'ccuracy is necessaiw. Sir Wil Hani Hamilton avers that too retentive amemory-tenda to hinder the development of the judgment, b^^ presenting too much for decision.' A w;ork like this is tlm^' better than memory. It is a 'mental larder' which needs no care, and wbo^e ?oWteai^^? ...... John H. Vinornt, Chancellor of CnArTACQUA Univebsitt ..... PB0R880B WUXLAM T. HarBIS S. 0. Babtlktt, Pbesident of Dabtiiouth Oolleob J. R. Kendbick, fobmeblt Pbesident of Yassab College ..... TnioTHT DwioHT, Pbesident of Talk College . E. G. Robinson, Pbesident of Bbown Univebsity James 6. Anoell, Pbesident of Univebsity of Michigan ..... Andbew D. "White, fokmkbly President of Cob- nell University .... PAOK First Papery 9 Second " 18 Third Fourth Fifth Sixth Seventh Eighth Ninth Tenth Eleventh 29 89 50 60 69 91 102 112 (ONIVERSITT tsmr) FIRST PAPER. 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 tea" 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 abacua 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 bom 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 bom in the middle of a large family. What saith the Yulgate ? " 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 weU 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 tlie 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 tbree 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 thera 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 FuUum came for me. Abel FuUum 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 ns 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 !^£iss 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 gradiiating 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 sinca lie 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 sinca 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 waa 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. Tinder 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 Robinson Crusoe when I was eight years old. But I knew nothing of the Latin language, as a lan- guage, tiU 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- gibla And, to answer the question of The Foeum, " what came " of my education of the first seven or eight years, I should say that this ability to read was one 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 mina 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 he does not understand his own countrymen, I always suspect that he never had the great privilege of associating with the other boys of his town and his time at a public school. Of course, this advice is wholly different from the 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 the school of Ben. Franklin, of both Adamses, of John Hancock, and in later times of Everett, of Sumner, and Wendell Phillipa We are all proud of it in Boston. In my day it was under the admirable care of Mr. Dillaway, the same who is well known to teachers by his good editions of Latin text-booka 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 the end of the report there was a sort of sub-report of "Rank 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 ma 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 gi'owing 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- now 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 bj 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 I 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 I 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 Modem Language Department One could then pick up a decent, ready knowledge of the modem 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 tlie next vacation from tlie 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 lif a 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 whodi the college had 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 now I WAS EDUCATED. I7 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 natura We were forever together, in boyhood and in coUega 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 imder the admirable lead of Mr. BixwelL 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 boya To some of those boys, therefore, I owe aU 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 PAPEE. By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. In Pope's once famous " Recollections of P. P., Clerk of tliis 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 FoKUM 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 1 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. O. W. Holmes. I was thus bom 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 " Village 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 playmata 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 "Eill 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 1 WAS EDUCATED. ^"^i.^iilCM' 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 bojs. 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. Uale, 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 modem 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 lectura 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 modem 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. 28 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 hand, 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 tlie graceful figures of tlie 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, Prol 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. R 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 " Keliques 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 lifa 26 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. Most of tliem were passed in tlie 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 bom 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 Yandervelde, a Joshua Eeynolds, and a fine oil copy of the Sistine Madonna by Moritz Eetzch. 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 Museam. "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 t3rpe 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 beeo, 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 Eichter, 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 Henrj 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 liappy 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 studioujs 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 tTie 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 Eeflectioru" 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 thera Two years of this desultory life and two years of more systematic work in the Theological School were all that was left forme of academical existenca 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 elsewhera 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 R A. P. BARNARD. " Next," is the order which I hear from the Editor of The Forum ; 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 ma 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 imable to tell distinctly how I was edu- 30 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. cated, I find no difficulty in giving an account of the attempts wliich. were made to educate me. It was in tlie district school of mj 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. "Wlien 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. 81 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 housa 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 encouraga 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 genitiva" 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 imsystematic 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 33 HOW I WAS EDITCATED. Goose" up to " Eobinson Crusoe" and the " Pilgrim's Progress." But I very early became farailiar 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, Eobertson, and others among the prose writers. I read also with great interest "Eollin'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 staga 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 " uEneid " and the " Georgics " of Yirgil. HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 83 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 tlie 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 offica 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 3 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 glimpsas I thus obtained of the o{3eration of natural forces stimulated my desire to learn more. I became an experimenter myselt 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 Royal 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 Ilaven. 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 resourca 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. 87 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 Yala 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 privil^ed 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 coUege, 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 himsell But in so far as education con- sists in the acquisition of knowledge, he will find himself soon undeceived. It was so with ma 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 modem 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 8 88 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. must begin at tlie beginning. I took up first tbe Frencli lan- guage, and without a teacher, by 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 eodtus e statu pupillary 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 himsell Witness, for instance, a Benjamin Franklin, a Hugh Miller, a Michael Faraday, and an Abraham Lincoln. FOURTH PAPER. By chancellor JOHN H. VINCENT. Madame Nkckar used to say, "It is never pennissible to Bay * 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 vrriters 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 I 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 j and from that other notion that education belongs 40 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. cliiefly to tlie early years of one's life. Reminiscence does not bring my greatest joy as a student, for the present days are by far my best days, since in tbem 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 bom 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 silenca She was beyond most women in all the best qualities of motherhood, and to me, as Richter says, she "has made all other mothers venerable." With Tennyson I can sing: " Happy is he with such a mother I 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 1887, while the family were en route from Alabama to the Susquehanna Valley. 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, K J., at tlie Wesley an Institute, wliicli closed my career as a formal student in a regular institution. During tliese school years I studied all that any boy under fifteen or sixteen was expected to study. I mastered Kirkham's " English Grrammar," 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- closed 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. 48 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 pagtor — 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 homa I read "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Swiss Family Robinson," 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 "Rome," Rollin's "Ancient His- tory," Pitkin's " Civil and Political History of the United States," Plutarch's " Lives," PoUock'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 I WAS EDUCATED. ing liis cliildren to the use of good EnglisL All mis-pro- nunciations and all "bad grammar" whicli lie 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 mj 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 rula 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 ma 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 mj reh'gious 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 clajsa. 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 sufiiciently encouraged by my father, seemed to me frivolity ; my mother's saintliness all the while appearing as necessary as it was unattainable. This chaotio 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 extrema 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, Biiptists and pedo-Baptists ; heard something of Second Advent J*f 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 Kev. 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 alona 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. 4.^ correct pronunciation tliere 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 sermona I made effort after effort to bring conscience and circum- stanoes 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 1862 he writes: "I notice 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, witli written sermons and annual examinations. Un- der tMs 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' collie 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 tlie 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 collega 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 Virgil, 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 my 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 have 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. 61 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 ona 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 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 nsei 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 Dsed 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 vcipdrj^ by the Greeks, was used by Prometheus in preserving the stolen fire by means of its tinder-like 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 flie in his pupils with the ferule? We know that Aristotle was Alexander's school-master. But I leave this interesting question to the skillful archseologists. 52 HOW 1 WAS EDUCATED. Latin phrases and sentences, witli their translations. On a visit in mj 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 E'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 the 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 Tnemoriter 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. 58 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 methoda 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 rac& 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 SpanisL 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; U'NXVERSITT 54 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. " That's riglit ; " and picking up tlie book proceeded, mucli to my surprise, to assign me a lesson to learn — tlie paradigm Penna, From that day I studied Latin. My teacher hunted up an old copy of " Andrews' Latin Eeader," and with a most superficial knowledge of inflections I began to translate "^sop's Fables." Some two years before this, at nine, I had taken English gram- mar, in Eoswell 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 lifa 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 an 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 school, 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 doubtless fail to understand even one-half of what he reads, HOW I WAS EDUCATED. 05 but the 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, Rhode 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 meohanism 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 difliculty. 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. Lave very materially modified my opinion of its strict disciplina The great object of all education is to fit tlie individxial 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 modem 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 modem 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 G-reece, 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 posB OOOcd 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. Daring 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 " tliat I liad acquired at Andover, I soon became reallj 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 Yale, 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 " modems " — modern science, modem literature, and modern history. Soon after this I discovered that my slender knowledge of X. HOW I WAS EDUCATED. " 59 Latin and Greek was mj chief instrument in the acquirement of new ideaa 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 modem civilization is derivative, resting on the Greek for its eesthetic and scientific forms, and on the Roman for the forms of its political and legal life. The frame- work of civilization being thus borrowed, modem culture has likewise to learn to know itself by studying, 80 to speak, its embryology in Latin and Greek. In our schools we put on for awhile the spiritual clothing of the Greeks and Romans and look out upon the world through their eyea 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 lifa All that I have here described belongs, as it were, to a sort of antemundane soul-wandering. SIXTH PAPER. By PEESIDENT 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 ona 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". BL, 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 Richard 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 tliem 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 weU in the primary branches. The grammar teaching alone was mechanical; the rest was thorougL 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 usa 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 Kapoleon," 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 Laka" 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. G3 me recite five minutes, he shut the book with a slap that made mj cheeks bum, 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 ppose or poetry, except for the purpose of declamation. It was a great oversight. After two sammers 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 valua 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, Derry, 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. Hildretli, tlie principal, was proud of the number and quality of tbe young men lie bad 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 sinca 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 mj senior. In some of the later studies his age gave him the advantaga 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 schema 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 exercisa He was an ex- cellent Latin scholar, and had a singularly pure English styla 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 Vermont 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 tlie 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 myseK. 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 Reserve 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 pedagogua 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 educatioa 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. bave done other tilings 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 facte 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 Baptiste 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 spirite of the region found refuga 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 environmente 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 Vermont village would form a theme for an inter- esting essay. Still, the community into which I was bom 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 autobiograpliy 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 " N"ew 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 He 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 " \inpleasantness " 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 coma 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 R's and Gr's. He even commended the little attempts at doggerel rhymes which, by a sudden descent upon me, he sometimes found on my slate, OF THK TJNIVEBS 72 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. and to the end of his days, 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 abeady 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 mj 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 com-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 languaga 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 bis 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 L, 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 modem languages. It would not surprise me to find in some colleges the standard so raised that students now b^in 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 tlie review of my college life is tlie fact tliat I graduated so young, wlien only nineteen. I was not suffi- ciently matured to get the best results out of an academic coursa 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 lif a 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 nobla 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 plino 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 I At all events, justly or imjustly, 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 Virgil 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 weU 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 aUow 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 SoutL 78 HOW I WAS EDUCATED. I have ventured to speak of growing in reputation witli tlie 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-bom 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 eariy 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 lifa 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 OF THK XJNIVER; 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 forca 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 mattera 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 Cassar'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 place 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 WjVS educated. 83 was an enthusiast in his profession, tliorough, 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 influenca "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 attractiva 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 thena. 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. wliicli 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 boys 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 myseK 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 — now I WAS EDUCATED. 86 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 paj>ers, 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 mos^ 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 witli 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 remarkabla His humor was inexhaustible, ^o 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 lif a 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 desirabla 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 ma 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 cannot 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 scholarsliip 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 Grreek 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 diJfferent 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 bejjefit 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. Rev. 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 hie. 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 liko 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 president R G. ROBINSON. 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 *' Etj^mology," 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 Teneriffa" 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 Teneriffa 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 scienca 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 ma 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 instract, and withal was a dull and uninspiring teacher. With the ex- ception of a mere smattering of mechanical principles, misnamed ITatural 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 yon 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 futila 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, tlie 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. 97 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 Pa^vtucket 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 ma The New Hampton acad- emy, during my absence from it, had undergone a change ; it had now younger ai\d 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-coUegiate 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, wliicli were so marked a feature of the college of forty or fifty years ago. 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 collega 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 stiU better as a colleague, I learned both to love and honor him as one of the truest and most conscientious of scholars and men. Khetoric, when I entered Brown, was cultivated with marked success under the distinguished professor, William E. Goddard ; 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 tlie 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. JSTor 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 Eesponsibility." His " Moral Science " had pleased neither slaveholders nor abolitionists. It had ofifended 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 thirtj 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 Reform Bill The mutual stimulus of the class was no un- important factor in our education. I left collie with perhaps an average knowledge of Latin, Greek, and mathematics; of modem 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 Bamas 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. Bt president JAMES B. ANGELL. I SHALL aim to make this sketcli, furnislied at tlie request of tlie 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 bom 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 " DaboU'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 fuU 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 now 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 Rhode Island remember with appreciation the solid English education which the stem Quaker, Isaac Fiske, imparted to them in the school house 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 tlie academy by boys of my age, and it was decided that I sbould give my whole time to Latin. And bere 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 bad been studying for nearly two years the Latin Grammar, committing to memory the long abstract rules and lists of exceptions to the rules, but bad 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 Csesar or YirgiL 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, Eev. 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 gnages, and pushed on througli 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 purposa 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 Yirgilian 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. merited 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 modem 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 witli this inspiring teacher formed an epoch in my intellectual life, as in that of many other boy a He repre- sented the best type of the modem 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 bo- 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 bo 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 Yirgil 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 1846. 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 modem 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 acti^ 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 now I WAS EDUCATED. HI between which chair and the chair of Civil Engineering was offered me soon after mj 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 uijiversities brings to the young Amer- ican, I cannot here adequately speak. At this point, with my assumption of the chair of Modem 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 hia real education, and how much that is best in it lies this side of school and of college I \BRA^T 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 school 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, now 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 tima 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-pressura Mental recreation was obtained in a loose way from the " RoUo " books, the " Parley " books, "Sandford and Merton," the "Children's Magazine," and the lika 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 simpla 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 modems. I only regret that more of the same sort was not dona 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 Hajne. 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 haK-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 now 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 proseljrte any of his students. Yet the very atmosphere of the school made sectarian bigotry and nar- rowness impossibla 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 remarkabla 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. 0. 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 tlian made up by the love of manli- ness and tlie 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 Grallery 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. II7 rae 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, C16ry 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 Sjrracuse 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 dd lecture system. It was the time when lectures were expected to build character and in- crease knowledga 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, Dr. 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 sm-prised 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- moniuro. 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 cowp 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 Btudiea Among my books was D'Aubign^'s " History of the Reformation." Its deficiencies were not of a sort to harm me; itd 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 modem 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 bj 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 "Eichelieu." 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 recreatioa 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 1 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 Fran§ais, 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 Eevolution, 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. Randall, 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. Tlie 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 Grerman 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 Eaumer, and others. The lectures of Eanke 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 lifa 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 Fishbume 1 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' d^rees 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-off 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 antislavery 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 THE FO RUM, The New Review. couniiy. — MaiC^ ani» ii iii->.*ii»>('.s -ui. ■\citini: intelligent poop lent, both <>[ patlibaii Liua and count ing-room influence. liiii Dn-^rntinf; ommsiug views not for the purjioso of lie reader to tonl\ wise CDuelusions. -■-.lyists ; «nd it also invites to its pages inen ami in-.-t-kiiow 11 w«tiren conneeted witli important business and social interests who have special uitei for infonnatioii. A Few of the Contributors. lV-t,l. ..t .luli.is I! -ideiit .John Bascoiii V. Dr. Cyrus iranilin. i;..!,.... K I> Mm vi.i F»M.»W hMA ■f. n^ry C. AJaiils. ir. Mallock. -idont .J, U. ii.ntiri' k r N'wmnn Siiiytli. v(. If. 11. Timrston. \n: Williijo A. liamiuu, , r.i^ Worsts I'a^tia. I'r- ■ 1. TJifCHkjrr < I'rof, Willis,.!. BeeclKT. iv. n, 1?. I-'iothinghain. Pi-;. :-:v.!: , i: , ■ -int Alletr. • \.>.!:vw 1). \V„,: tiard H. Dana. l*i.-»iiU.-itt .hiiiiv.- i; ;>, .. Wi. A...„,i,_; . i . .., l^^e E. H. Bemiott. .^vA^v KJw.ir.l A Julia Wanl How,-. I'rof. Thomas Davidson. llishoj) W. C. Do. • Plot David .Swinir- 1). M. Craik. »'ri>l. Francis L. fatten \. Ur.'Lfunard W. Bacon. Prof. George J. Rouiancs Pi esklfnt Franks A . w /■I r;ynri Linton. Dr. Edward C. SpitZka. - •■ V ^ -.; - .. General W. F. Smitli. Published Monthly. 50 cts. a copy. $5.00 a year. The Forum Publishing Co., 97 Fifth Ave., New York. A HISTORY OF OUR HEROES, OUR STATESMEN, OUR SCHOLARS, OUR MEN OF NOTE IN EVERY FIELD. APPLETONS' CYCLOPAEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY EDITED BY JAMES GRANT WILSON and JOHN FISKE. "Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography," now in course of publication, will contain a biographical sketch of every per?on eminent in American civil and military history, in law and politics, in divinity, literature, and art, in science, and in invention. Its plan includes distinguished persons born abroad that are related to our national history, and embraces all the countries of North and South America. While the biographies, in depicting the lives of the great actors in American annals, include a record of events, the work affords in addition an account of what has been accomplished in the walks of literature, science, art, and industry. It therefore when completed will be a history of the New World in every hranch of human achievement. Numerous flattering testimonials have been received from distinguished gentlemen highly praising the first volume, a i^w of Avhich we here subjoin: From the Hon. George Bancroft. " The most complete volume that exists on the subject.'''' From the Hon. .James Russell Lowell. " Surprisingly well done. . . . To any iutercsicd in American history or literature the book will be indispensable.'''' From Noah Porter, D. D., LI.. D., ex-President of Yale College. "// is with great pleasure that I certify to the excellence of the first volume of' Appletons* C yclopcBdia of American Biography."''' From the Hon, M. R. Waite, Chief-Justice of the United States. '■^ I have looked it over trith considerable care, and find nothing to say except in praise.^^ This great work will he completed in six volumes, 8vo, each containing between seven and eight hundred pages. Each volume will be illustrated with ten fine steel portraits and several hundred smaller vignette portraits and views of the birthplaces, residences, monuments, and tombs of distinguished Americans. The volumes will appear at intervals of four to six months. Price, $5.00 per volume. YoltjmEs One and Two are now beady. Sold only hy subscription. Agents wanted for districts not yet assigned. New York: D. APPLETaN'"£ '0G.,'Pn^i9hers, 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street. I UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 24AV80GE