read and the masters under whom he has studied form the history and explain the fortunes of his mind. In aid of teachers so fit, the one to animate, the other to assist his own indomitable propensities, the Institution offered to Hugh another instrument of the finest knowledge-a library if not voluminous in its contents, yet choice in its composition, and particularly rich in its classical collection, in literature at large, and in history, ancient and modern.* To one like him, of a boundless ardour for the noblest studies, of parts and an application already taking the largest and most muscular proportions, and rapidly growing into a strenuousness fit to wrestle with whole libraries, such a collection was, of itself, almost enough for this stage of his life. With it alone he would have taught himself, almost as fast, every thing that lectures can impart. 'Tis but little. "Paul may plant, and Cephas may water; but it is only God that can give the increase." From the mere living, how small the part which such a man as Legaré would take! The best of them could only be to him an index and point him to higher, to real sources. Do colleges educate such men? They educate themselves. Ordinary people are educated; but genius must be its own instructor. He who learns no great deal more than professors can teach him is, after all, but a better sort of blockhead and a sufficient ignoramus. The degree, indeed, in which all real education is self-education-the glow, the impulse, the passion and the power to know, acting of itself-seems but little felt in this age of such imagined improvements in the art of instruction. Pity that men should grow worse scholars just in proportion to the improvement of erudition's helps! This is the era and these the helps of mediocrity and facility, that do nothing ill and nothing well. When all things come to be easy, great things cease to be performed. It might have been well or at least considerably more convenient for Mungo Park, could he have travelled through Africa in stage-coaches; but the fact would not then have rendered Mungo a great man. Children may be made. to walk the sooner by the help of go-carts and leading-strings; which, however, enfeeble, just as much as they expedite the limbs. These It then embraced, probably, about 9,000 volumes-a moderate collection for an English country-gentleman, but, among us, the library of a State. By this time, it may contain 15,000 volumes. We knew it under the control of an Antiquarius, (as the Latins called a librarian) who published a catalogue in which vastly voluminous authors, named "Euvres" and "Opera," figured greatly. ŒUVRES wrote Voltaire, Montesquieu, and most of the French books; OPERA, Cicero, Plato, and the larger Latin and Greek works generally. notions are not inappropriate to our subject: we should not set them down, however, if they were not those of him of whom we write. It was here, then, for the first time, that our young student-groping no longer, with uncertain hand, in the mere school room, after a scanty knowledge-came where, with every liberal aid and every light, it courted his grasp on all sides. It was the narrow task, the penurious illustration, the books already exhausted, no longer: a new world of thought was before him; and he hailed it with the joy of that warlike adventurer who, climbing the isthmus, first saw the South Seas beyond, and deemed all that deep his own. Our allusion is no exaggerated one; for no breast of conqueror or world-finder ever knew a fervour of purpose or a rapture of hope stronger than the enthusiasm of letters and of all the noble things of which they may be made the instruments, that was now fast kindling up in poor Legaré. Heretofore, he had seemed merely the boy of fine capacity and inclinations: but now the instinct of what he was to be awoke in him; the dream of his young life took shape; the forms of every thing good and fair, that had flashed upon him intimations from his studies or his thoughts, grew palpable and waived him on to tread a career as yet unattempted in this country-of a preparation, the completest, brought to practical life in its most difficult pursuits; of mastering, by consummate labour, learning enough for a lifetime of erudition, accomplishments enough for a lifetime of leisure, and then turning all these to the aid of public performance. Such soon grew to be his conception; nor did he ever after relax in its execution. sadden him; nor did It will naturally be supposed that nothing short of an ambition the most violent could have urged him to such a plan: yet we doubt if that was really the passion that ever led him on. We have said that, in after-life, his public successes seemed often to they ever appear eagerly sought. For even the distinctions at which he had legitimately arrived, he was never in haste: he was rather borne to them by his reputation than by any effort of his own competition. No man ever less possessed or less desired the art (Ambition's main tool) of availing himself of other men, of rising by contrivance. To deserve, and to be, if at all, by deserving, was evidently his only thought. And he who aspires in but this wise, let him reach as high as he may, if he can be said to be ambitious, is rather ambitious of merit than its reward, which chance and men may bestow or refuse. Another and a more antique passion, caught from more famous days and their genius, certainly animated him, however—that which taught the Greek to prefer the laurel crown adjudged by his assembled nation, to power supreme or unbounded wealth Glory, the reward That sole excites to high attempts-the flame All treasures and all gain esteem as loss, For this alone-to have left some lasting monument to human recollection, an action that would preserve his name grateful to other times, a book that might delight posterity-he asked no better than "To scorn delights and live laborious days." This, indeed, as all knew who knew him well, was the spirit of the man and with it there mixed two sentiments not a little sacred, one of them so secret as to disclose itself only to those nearest hima profound and religious feeling (perhaps the offspring of his constitu. tional melancholy) of the nothingness of every thing but virtue and affection. A gloom often settled over him that frightened all vanity from its shadow, lulled mere ambition in rebuke, and stilled all aspirations but the most legitimate. The other sentiment, to which we allude, was that of a filial love the most pious and fond, which, while his mother lived, referred to her a great part of the pleasure of success and, after her death, made each triumph a mourning for her whom it should have gladdened. As to mere popular fame and the hour's notoriety; the perishable opinion that can hardly remember its own immortalities of last year; the oblivious glory which an obscure rout can confer; the idle admiration of an insensate crowd, the miscellaneous rabble of men, that extol they know not what and exalt they know not whom, just as one may lead another, or as the instant's cry may raise a particular name-the love of this sort of thing, however much it suffices for power or matches the ambition of democracies, was no feeling of Legaré's. Except so far as good men are pleased with the affection of many and so far as even the wise desire public favour that they may through it serve their kind, he was absolutely indifferent to every thing like a vulgar reputation, and cared not to live upon the tongues and be the talk of those, of whom to be dispraised is often the better commendation. He never earned and he never sought much of this fool-renown. No man possessing so much of the powers that sway the multitude ever exerted them less to draw it after him. Nor, indeed, VOL. I.-C was he-though borne by his opinions and habits towards the reve rence for authority, orders, and transmitted, historic greatness-much more the captive or the slave of the more splendid extremity of life, of aristocratic eminence: the men about him, in a word, the few or the many, the great or the small, drew but little the homage of a mind too large, too just, and measuring things around him too constantly by the ideas of the past and its broad greatness, to be dazzled by rank or success, any more than numbers. To shine in brilliant circles and to be the observed of their observers was clearly not his wish. In life, his associations were, from taste, few, and led him always, of preference, to a small and intimate body of friends, in whom his sympathies and affections found fellowship, rather than any vanity or interest its advantage. None of these characteristics-all of which are unquestionable-are those of ambition. We take his mind, in short, to have been of that rare cast which, when young, is kindled up by no definite aim or hope, but simply by its own love of what is fair and great. Such spirits are, in their immaturity, too apprehensive of what is admirable, of too profound a sensibility to the beautiful, for that self-enamourment which makes men ambitious betimes. Such glow at the genius of others and pant after its productions, when inferior men are thinking of their own. It is not direct aspiration, then, that leads them on, but the need, the besoin to nourish themselves with the food of greatness, its illustrious actions, its immortal thoughts, the knowledge which is its instrument, the art that must be its vehicle. A temper and a soul like this will, of course, with the growing consciousness of learning mastered and skill abtained, acquire an artificial ambition; but sedate, calm, high, selfjudging, and even intent on the great past and future, not that petty link between them, the present. Their ambition then, when formed, is not that of momentary power or celebrity, but of something that shall equal them with all former times and carry them far into future ones. To write, if possible, his name upon his age and for his country was the longing of Legaré; and this is not ambition, but love of glory, of just and lasting praise. Certainly there was that about him, in personal intercourse, which might seem, to those who conceived him not, vanity. To have totally escaped its slighter influences over the manner was well-nigh impossible to one who had so much commanded admiration every where, from his very childhood. But they who knew him better knew that these apparent gleams of self-esteem were really little else than a part of his early tincture of antique feelings--of his Greek and Roman notion of the fitness and fairness of encomium. To his friends, he sometimes talked of himself or of them, as if in the third person, as Cicero or Pliny or Horace do, with a classic ingenuousness. He had a pleasure in praising or being praised with discrimination and by those he loved. Indeed, apart from our modern coldness to such things, what can be fitter between friends than this communion of judgments, this mutual criticism, to fire each other's minds to the observing well? Yet, with all this, we have never known a successful writer less addicted to referring to his own performances, an orator less occupied with his own last speech, a scholar less addicted to the needless display of learning. Let us, however, resume the march of our narrative. who, at college, labors for Except that remarkable Cooper, late president of His college term of four years was of course one of prodigious toil and proficiency: for now the original vigor of his temperament was fast re-establishing itself from the severe shock in his childhood, and seemed only to be excited by the very labors which would have destroyed almost any body else. This extraordinary power of application, too, stood by him to the last, unexhausted by a life of study as incessant as is the utmost ardor or him manhood's first honor and hope, a degree. scholar and man of science, Dr. Thomas the South-Carolina College, who, up to the age of near 80, kept up with all the progress of the chief sciences, with that of the main parts of literature, devoured the very novels of an age of trash, and read in short every thing, even to the congressional speeches and quantities of reviews and newspapers, we have never known any one of such vast intellectual activity. We need scarcely add that he filled himself with Latin and Greek, mastered a large body of history, and acquired, besides a sound knowledge of the physical sciences, a great amount of the best literature, poetry and eloquence, together with an acquaintance with the principles and history of those cognate arts of the imagination, painting, sculpture, and music, for which his natural taste was strong. Much he mastered as far as for the mere wholeness of a liberal education is necessary; of much he formed a solid basis for a future superstructure of knowledge; and in not a few subjects he had begun investigations, by and bye to be resumed, somewhat "As those who unripe veins in mines explore On the rich bed again the warm turf lay, ⚫ Dryden, Annus Mirabilis. |