To this vehement prosecution of the regular academic studies and of what could best elucidate, in voluntary research, his own favorite pursuits, he joined an assiduous cultivation of whatever could lead him to oratory as an art the most regular and finished. We need scarcely say that he resorted, as was always his first thought in whatever he undertook, at once to the great sources; that he put aside those false helps, rhetorical systems, the corruptors, not teachers, of eloquence, born of its decline and expediting it, as incapable of making the great speaker as the great poet or prosaist. He read with the minutest care the great ancient masters of harangue, the true models of persuasion; and with them he joined all that the historians and poets contain of eloquence in other forms. The great poets, perhaps, claimed and received, even more than the orators, his study, as affording, for all the purposes of oratory, resorts still more perfect— forms of discourse more animated, imaginative, energetic and affecting; much greater delicacy and grace as well as precision and force of diction; an infinitely greater command of language and its mechanism, of sound and its resources, than the most admirable prose compositions can furnish. He saw, in short, that for all the purposes of composition, in no matter what language, the poets must be mastered; that from their art must descend all the others that deal with the imagination and the senses. He perceived that oratory is little but poetry subdued to the business of civic life. He studied it, therefore, as a great and serious part of knowledge; first in the great epic and tragic writers of antiquity, and afterwards in those of his own tongue; from which he passed to that of the modern Latin dialectsFrench, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and something of Provencal ; with German, Low Dutch, and Romaic, later in life. In Ancient Letters, he possessed himself very perfectly, for all literary and historical or political purposes, of the Greek writers of all the latter age; of Homer learnedly, as infinitely the greatest of merely human wits and the main key to profane Antiquity; of the three great tragic poets, Pindar, and the lyric writers, accurately; of Aristophanes, as every way important, but especially in the elucidation of the worst period of the Athenian democracy. To these he joined the finer historians and above all Thucydides, whom he adored as far the profoundest and noblest of such authors, an able soldier, an admirable politician, an accomplished orator, and a writer unmatched in all the severe beauties of composition. Of the orators, we need scarcely speak; his singularly fine and original defence of the greatest of

them sufficiently manifests his intimate knowledge of them all. Among the philosophers, he studied Plato and Aristotle most carefully; and, in a word, his Hellenistic scholarship, not spent upon philological nicetics though far from neglecting them, was, for the mastery of what is most worth possessing in that language, very high indeed, such as is not easily found in Europe, and not at all approached by any body in this country. With the Latins, though less his delight, he was familiar in proportion Their poets, orators and annalists he knew thoroughly, and of every thing that could illustrate the great system of jurisprudence with which Rome compensated her conquests, he by and bye possessed himself very completely.

French, as the modern tongue of most immediate necessity, he early learnt to speak and to write almost as purely as his own; however, very highly valuing, its more elegant literature, -except Molière, Boileau, La Fontaine, Montaigne, Rabelais and the older writers. He made himself well-versed in its historic authors, particularly its rich old Chroniclers; had dipped into its now-forgotten Romance, the chivalric and classic; and was duly read, as a part of his profession, in whatever it contains of valuable in jurisprudence and legislation at large.

As a tongue of richer and purer literature than any other modern one, Italian delighted him greatly. From Dante and Boccaccio, and Petrarch, he had read downwards through the long and bright line of poets and historians to Alfieri. The illustrious, the profound, the virtuous and patriotic, but ill-fated Machiavelli, who has painted so admirably the wise tyrant and his arts that the bitterest of satires has, ever since, out of Italy, passed for an encomium and a guidebook of the merciless and faithless despot, was one of his main favorites among books. His fondness for the fine arts found also its main gratification in Italian. Its music was the favorite solace of his ear, long accustomed to it in the tones and touch of a sister, much skilled in it and landscape painting-talents which his own taste, forbidden directly to cultivate, enjoyed greatly in her.

• See his elaborate tractate "On Demosthenes, the orator, the statesman and the man," originally produced in the "New-York Review."

+ Witness his survey of them, in his criticism of Dunlop's History of Roman Legislation."

See his essay on "Roman Legislation," and other scattered proofs of his learning in Civil Law and its sources.

Of German-entirely a later attainment, we must not speak, in this survey of attainments strongly founded at college. Nor need we pause to mention more of his Spanish than that he had explored its early historic and romantic literature; knew most of those whom the Curate (that admirable critic) in Don Quixotte hands not over to the secular arm of the barber and the house-keeper; had read, like Doña Inez herself,

"All Calderon and greater part of Lopé,"

and wrote and spoke the language with ease and correctness.

In his English, he had taken the same wide range as in his Greek, making himself thoroughly acquainted with its archaic poets, its early popular literature, and that wealth of antiquated forms, to which, or when the age of commonplace comes and letters like government decline through the multitude of those interfering, the skilful will return for fresher impressions and a diction that has not yet lost its power to please. He studied carefully the older authors, that wrote an unexhausted English-the sturdy, manly race that knew not of slip-slop-our old writers, that Pope knew, but Johnson did not the forgotten poets and dramatists, Raleigh, Cowley, Clarendon, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, and the Parliament men of the times of the Commonwealth. Among all, however, his early and his incessant passion was Milton, whose verse he had read and repeated with a rapture always new, and whose prose he extolled as quite as much nobler than all other English as his poetry.

Such were the merely philologic and literary studies on which he thought it necessary to build that consummate art of eloquence to which he aspired, as the first gift under a popular government. Treatises, we have said, which set methods for that for which one has no material and (as generally used) teach an art as compends alone would teach history, he paid little attention to, knowing full well that he had something better than rules to put into him, in order to become an orator; and that when he had filled himself with the spirit of orators and poets, with knowledge and thought and passion, he should have arrived at not merely the artificial rule, but the sources from which it was drawn. When he had amassed ideas and images-something to write about and to give a purpose-something totally different from the senseless training of youths set at ornamenting a discourse before they can make its basis, sense-he practiced, assiduously, composition, without a thorough discipline in which a man can no more become an able speaker, than a great painter without having sketched for years,

We know not the fact directly, but it is certain that, with his strong poetic temperament and taste, he must have been led to the practice of versifying his thoughts and those of others. All who are strongly sensible to the charms of verse naturally attempt it; and Legaré, intent on every thing that could perfect him in the mechanism of thought and sound, cannot have failed to perceive that rhythmical composition, from its far more artful structure, the choice of expression which it compels, and above all the habit of compacter sense which it brings about, improves one's prose, just as dancing does one's walking. That he ever permitted a verse of his to be seen, beyond an epigram or two, we are not aware: but the sonorous management of his sentences makes it clear that he had addicted himself to metri. cal studies.

All these are the general studies of style: but besides, at this especial period of life, the attainment of a particular one is almost invariably attempted. In spite of the axiom, Le style c'est l'homme, men are so largely mere copyists of others, that they almost universally select a model, upon which they endeavour to fashion, as to manner, their own intellectual character. How many unhappy votaries of the effort to be, not one's-self, but another, has Swift made? How many victims, immolators of such little wit as God gave them, have fallen before the shrines of those false divinities, Junius and Dr. Johnson! 'Twould be deplorable to think of, but that, happily, it is of very little consequence how people write who have not enough in them to be themselves. Their ideas rarely give one any occasion to lament the feebleness of their expression. This mistake, Legaré, guided by the sure instinct of right study, evidently never committed. His taste sought too wide a range, and excellences too various, for him ever to sink into the shallow monomaniac of a single model, the cuckoo of one little borrowed strain. He saw that a man's style must be animated with his own entire individuality; and that it is what it should be, good or bad, just in proportion as it is the natural and adequate vehicle of the mode and hues of his intellectual and moral identity. He perceived that the imitation of a particular great writer might be useful, as a mere exercise; but chiefly either to correct some defect of one's own, or to form to one's-self a greater facility and plasticity. He felt that, instead of one, he must study all models; learn to command, in no small degree, all styles; and fuse them, in the glow of his mind, into the proper image of his own thoughts and feelings.

Along with all these things went, of course, the study of Declama

tion, and, as we have seen, the practice of extemporaneous speaking, in one of those Debating Clubs which form a voluntary but an indispensable adjunct of the American Institution of Learning; but which it only possesses in common with the school, the village, the town, and nearly every other community, learned or unlearned.

To him who has not formed elsewhere a just oratorical taste, there can be no worse school than these associations for debate. A few of that sort which, like Samson's bees, can gather honey from a carcass, may draw benefit from even these nurseries of disputatiousness and rant, which can teach little but faults to those who do not cultivate themselves abundantly in other methods: but in general this early practice of an art so difficult and needing so many well-managed auxiliaries can do little but to exhaust the fancy, corrupt the taste and fix the habit of giving to the smallest number of ideas the greatest number of words-a vice, accordingly, which the prevalence of these exercitations in wrangling and roar has rendered almost universal among us.

Yet the mere presence of an audience, the face of an adversary, the stir and the glow of performance in public, make of these exercises, for the student of eloquence, an important alternation with his solitary labours. They afforded to Legaré applications of what he had learnt, experiments of his own powers; and he no doubt profited by them. But the habitual use of dramatic reading and of giving voice, in his walks, to the most spirited compositions of the poets and orators stored in his memory, was to him a still better discipline of speech, always at his command, animating each lonely stroll with all the pleasures of music, and leading him, by the sort of vocal criticism which continual recitation produces, not merely to a nicer appreciation of admirable passages, but to the whole art of conveying passion or sense by the voice and the gesture. A temperament full of the profoundest sensibility and an ear true to all tones and ready to thrill with their effects, were seconded in him by a voice of extraordinary compass, sweetness and power, which, cultivated by and by with prodigious effort, became the most magnificent oratorical instrument to which we ever listened.

We have been told by a mutual intimate, his associate at college,*

* The late professor Henry Junius Nott, of the South-Carolina college; whose early death, Letters in the South lament, in common with the social affections, which few were so fit to awaken. A more estimable person, we have never known, and few of literary attainments more various and elegant. The gentleness, kindliness and probity of his character, his gay and easy humour, the amenity