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life.' He has nowhere assigned any reason why he was removed from Exeter. His progress there must have been entirely satisfactory to his father, his teachers, and himself. But probably the expense, although moderate, must have had some influence with his father, who found that he could command from a clergyman in his own neighborhood good instruction on easier terms. The state of his health, too, may have rendered it desirable that he should be nearer home; or it may have been thought that, as he was now fifteen years old, he could be carried forward faster by a private tutor than he could be in a great public school.

For some, or all of these reasons, his father determined, in February, 1797, to place him with the Rev. Samuel Wood, the minister of the adjoining town of Boscawen. The distance was about six miles from their home. On the way thither his father first disclosed to him the plan which he had formed of giving him a collegiate education. "I remember," he says, "the very hill which we were ascending, through deep snows, in a New-England sleigh, when my father made known this purpose to me. I could not speak. How could he, I thought, with so large a family, and in such narrow circumstances, think of incurring so great an expense for me? A warm glow ran all over me, and I laid my head on my father's shoulder, and wept."

Of the qualifications of Dr. Wood for the charge which he had undertaken, we can judge only from the very little which Mr. Webster has said with respect to the state of his preparation when he entered college. It was doubtless a period, as Mr. Everett has observed, when the general standard of classical attainments in our country was exceedingly low-far lower than it had been for several generations succeeding the first settlement of the country; and it was long after Mr. Webster had entered upon the active duties of life before there began to be any improvement in this respect. Dr. Wood was as good a scholar, it is fair to presume, as most clergymen in New Eng

He mentions, in his autobiography, and James II. Bingham, now of Clare"J. W. Bracket, late of New York, de- mont, N. H." ceased; William Garland, late of Portsmouth, deceased; Governor Cass, of Michigan; Mr. Saltonstall [of Salem];

xxiv.)

Biographical Memoir.—(Works, i.,

land at that day; and it is equally safe to assume that he was not a better one. When Mr. Webster says that he got "a mere breaking in," and that he went to college "miserably prepared, both in Latin and Greek," we are to remember two things: first, that he remained with Dr. Wood only six months, and that at Exeter he had but a short training in the Latin grammar and none in the Greek; secondly, that at college, and afterward, as will hereafter appear, he became a very good Latin scholar at least, and was therefore very likely to depreciate the acquisitions which he carried with him when he left Dr. Wood.' In his autobiography he says:

"Mr. Wood put me upon Virgil and Tully, and I conceived a pleasure in the study of them, especially the latter, which rendered application no longer a task. With what vehemence did I denounce Catiline! with what earnestness struggle for Milo! In the spring I began the Greek grammar, and at midsummer Mr. Wood said to me: 'I expected to keep you till next year, but I am tired of you, and I shall put you into college next month.' And so indeed he did, but it was a mere breaking in; I was indeed miserably prepared both in Latin and Greek; but Mr. Wood accomplished his purpose, and I entered Dartmouth College, as a freshman, August, 1797.2

While he was at Dr. Wood's an incident occurred which shows the humorous indulgence of his father's treatment of him, and which I should mar if I were to attempt to repeat it in any other than the colloquial way in which he related it to some friends, on a drive from Boston to Salem, in 1825:

"My father sent for me in haying-time, to help him, and put me into a field to turn hay, and left me. It was pretty lonely there, and, after working some time, I found it very dull; and, as I knew my father was gone

1 In 1825 he spoke of Mr. Wood as "a man of some learning."-(MSS.)

2 Dr. Wood, who was also Ezekiel Webster's tutor, and afterward his pastor, was a man of great excellence of character; "distinguished," says Professor Sanborn, "for his rare Christian virtues. He was one of the excellent of the earth. During his long and successful ministry at Boscawen, he fitted more than one hundred young men for college. Those who could not pay the debt, he trusted; and to some very indigent pupils he forgave the debt. He was not an eminent

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scholar, though a lover of learning. He could appreciate genius without feeling its fires in his own bosom. By his unwearied diligence and fidelity he suc ceeded in making good scholars. labored from principle-from an everpresent conviction that he must do all within his power to benefit the rising generation. It was the boast and glory of his life that he was the tutor of Ezekiel and Daniel Webster. He loved them as children; they honored him as a father."(Correspondence, i., 35.)

away, I walked home, and asked my sister Sally if she did not want to go and pick some whortleberries. She said yes. So I went and got some horses, and put a side-saddle on one, and we set off. We did not get home until it was pretty late, and I soon went to bed. When my father came home he asked my mother where I was, and what I had been about. She told him. The next morning, when I awoke, I saw all the clothes I had brought from Dr. Wood's tied up in a small bundle again. When I saw my father he asked me how I liked haying. I told him I found it 'pretty dull and lonesome yesterday.' 'Well,' said he, 'I believe you may as well go back to Dr. Wood's.' So I took my bundle under my arm, and on my way I met Thomas W. Thompson, a lawyer in Salisbury; he laughed very heartily when he saw me. 'So,' said he, 'your farming is over, is it?'" 1

After this exploit in haying and picking whortleberries, there remained but six weeks in which to finish his preparation for college; and it appears that Dr. Wood thought it expedient to have some assistance for his Greek. "Well, sir," continued Mr. Webster, conversing in 1825 about his early life, "I went to Dr. Wood's, and, as my father had consented to my going to college, he got a young man of the name of Palmer, a senior in Dartmouth, to come and teach me Greek. I knew nothing at all about it, and I had just six weeks to prepare in. But I went to work, and entered in '97, when I was fifteen."

At Boscawen he had found another circulating library, and he read a great many of the books which it contained. But he mentions one only-" Don Quixote." It was the common translation, and in an edition of three or four duodecimo volumes. "I began to read it," he says in the autobiography, "and it is literally true that I never closed my eyes until I had finished it; nor did I lay it down, so great was the power of that extraordinary book on my imagination."

Such was the youth Daniel Webster when he entered Dartmouth College. In the ancient languages, the Latin grammar, the first six books of the "Eneid," Cicero's four Orations against Catiline, a little Greek grammar, and the four Evangelists of the Greek Testament, were his whole stock. In mathematics he had nothing but the small amount of arithmetic which he might have obtained at the town-schools and at Exeter. Of geography and history he had almost nothing but what he

1 MSS. account of a drive from Boston to Salem, in 1825, preserved by Mr. Ticknor.

1797.]

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had picked up in his desultory reading. In English literature we have certain knowledge that he had read some of Addison's prose, one of Pope's larger poems, the devotional poetry of Dr. Watts, and a translation of "Don Quixote." I have sought diligently to find the earliest period at which he first knew any thing of Milton and Shakespeare-poets whose imagery, sentiments, language, and lines became afterward so inwrought with his intellectual being that they sprang into his discourse, sometimes in unbidden and unconscious quotation, and sometimes with a purposed use of riches which he had stored in one of the most retentive memories ever possessed by man. But I find no evidence that his knowledge of Milton and Shakespeare began at this early age. It is certain, however, that, before he went to Dartmouth, he must have had some miscellaneous That he read every reading of which we have no account. thing he could get to read, he has told us; and, although the two circulating libraries, which came within his reach, at Salisbury and at Boscawen, must have been rather meagre collections, we may safely infer that he devoured whatever he could find in them that could attract a lad of his years. For he tells us: "In those boyish days there were two things which I did dearly love, viz., reading and playing-passions which did not cease to struggle when boyhood was over (have they yet, altogether?) and, in regard to which, neither cita mors nor the victoria laeta could be said of either."

1

1

"horae

Momento cita mors venit, aut victoria laeta."
HORACE, Sat. I. 7.

CHAPTER II.

1797-1801.

COLLEGE LIFE-RANK AS A STUDENT-DEVELOPMENT AND
ACQUISITIONS.

WB

E now enter upon a period, in the life of Mr. Webster, through which it is necessary to move with careful steps. The extraordinary elevation to which he rose has tended to invest his college-life with an uncommon interest, and to surround it with impressions which, however pleasing in their apparent conformity with what he afterward became, must be examined with fidelity. For those who knew him, and acted with him only after his mind was in its full maturity, and those who knew him only through the glory of his vast reputation, could not well conceive that there ever was a time, after his intellect began to be manifested at all to the observation of others, when it was not, in a degree corresponding to its subsequent exhibitions, of the same preeminent qualities and powers. Thinking and speaking of him as a prodigy, such as Nature can vouchsafe but once, men easily believed that, at all times, and in every period of his existence, he must have stood in the same relative superiority to his fellows, in which they saw and felt that he stood when they could compare him with others or themselves.

It is well known that there have been those, among the contemporaries of his youth, who have thought that his future greatness was then foreseen and predicted. But such a suggestion, even in regard to such a man, may challenge a dissent

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