Of Solomon Legaré, Jr., the father of the late Attorney General, we are in possession of few particulars beyond his early death: a misfortune usually involving, to male children-especially if there be but one-ill-governed youth and a neglected education.* These were, however, in this instance, averted, partly by the admirable qualities of the mother, partly by the strong faculties of the boy, betokened almost from his cradle; and what seemed, at first, another cruel calamity, came only to aid, at the expense of his body, his intellectual development.

He was born of fine and singularly large proportions, which up to his fourth year promised the strength and the stature of his stalwart ancestry, those baronial prickers who, for a thousand years keeping the Borders, won such titles and attributes of arms as "John with the Long Spear"-"Archibald of the Axe"-"Richard the Ready"-or "Stout Sir Alan," "of that huge mace still seen where war was wildest." But, at that age, it became necessary to inoculate him with the small-pox: the artificial disease took a more than usual virulence medical mismanagement probably aggravated it; and it finally put on the confluent form, fixing itself upon the larger joints (his elbows and knees) in deep imposthumes. These kept him for some three months on his back, utterly helpless, and at length so mere a skeleton that, from stout as he had been, he came to be, for some time, borne about by his mother on a pillow. When these wasting tumours were at last dissipated, they left him his fine trunk greatly enfeebled, though otherwise unimpaired; but with limbs which, though stout, never afterwards grew to their proper length or shapeliness. For eight or nine years, he is said scarcely to have gained in height at all; and then, on his transfer to school and college in the upper country, to have shot up, with great rapidity; but it was in the superior part of his person almost entirely; for while his chest, bust and head became those of a very fine torso, his members remained those of a very short man. Seated, his length of body set off by a broad and manly chest, a noble head, and an air unusually imposinghe looked of commanding person; but risen, he seemed suddenly to have shrunk out of his bodily advantages. The defective conformation thus superinduced, unfitted him, in boyhood for its sports, in manhood for its exercises, and so consigned him, as sickliness did Pope, or distortion of the feet Scott and Byron, to intellectual activity

The Gracchi and Sir William Jones afford the most remarkable exceptions. + Scott, "Halidon Hill," Act ii., Scene 3.

and the relief of study only. In these he sought and found noble compensation for whatever he had lost in strength or beauty of limbs. The instincts of a powerful nature, which might else have found vent in robuster pursuits and a more vulgar excellence, were thus compressed into all the vehemence of a single feeling-the necessity of knowledge and its delights--the passion of mastering other men with his mind, since he could no longer hope to master them with his body.

The domestic traditions, however--those fond personal romances, woven between Memory and Imagination, which delight to embellish and magnify into auguries of greatness each little fact of the childhood of remarkable people--are not wanting in the recollection of presages of his genius, that appeared from his tenderest age. There could usually need, in truth, little but a recurrence to the fancies--forgotten, like dreams, when the event has not confirmed them—awakened in mothers and nurses by each childish trait, in order to establish, in almost any person's favour, these promises of something extraordinary. Probably if all the world turned out sages or heroes--which were perhaps a pity-the authentic legends of every body's surprising infancy would be much the same. So, at least, in concession to the rationalism of an age averse to prodigies of every sort, except Mesmerism, Millerism, Paper Constitutions, Hydropathy and Progressive Democracy, we are willing to argue: but we ourselves have a faith less material, and love, when we believe in fables, that they should be of the older kind, such as Voltaire demolished without and Niebuhr with learning--the fables of God, and those fables of a prodigious and inborn personal superiority which-perhaps with not a little loss to mankind--must cease, like other miracles, when checked by an universal refusal to believe that such things can be.

Be all this as it may, and whether or not it be as wise as it is natural that an Age of Littleness should discredit individual eminence, just as a world of Pigmies must be expected to disbelieve in Giants, it is none the less our business as historians to manage this mythological period in our subject as grave writers have so often done the fabulous ages of Greek, Roman and other annals. Positive facts being few, we must recite myths or allegories; and, as geographers were formerly wont to scatter about those unknown parts, which they could not otherwise figure in their maps, monsters such as Zoology has never been able to describe, so must we fill this part of our page with what, perhaps, that which entitles itself Criticism and delights in disenchanting us of many things noble or agreeable or useful to believe,

VOL. I.-A

will refuse to accept as any thing but poetic inventions or even nursery tales.

He is reputed, then, in the domestic reminiscences, to have spoken at a remarkably early age, and to have betrayed, when but a little older, singular gleams of reflection and sense. As a child even, his air, manners and habits bespoke something unusual, something entirely superior to his years--indications of a marked and fine individuality. These were no doubt much assisted by the powerful mould of the person in which he was originatly cast, a large and strikingly developed head, and well-proportioned features, full of all the elements of thought and passion. Such as we know him first by report, in a distant State, whither some of his companions and his chief rival at college and elsewhere brought the fame (as it was for a youth of 17 or 18) of his extraordinary abilities-such as we afterwards knew him, certainly far the most accomplished person and most powerful genius that we have ever met-and such as we know that he seemed, at every part of his life, from his first school upwards, to all who remarked him as his elders or contended with him as his equals, we, at least, are perfectly prepared to receive as genuine all that his family relate of the earliest tokens which he gave of parts the most vigorous and of tendencies the most invincible to the utmost intellectual excellence to which one could be bred up in the country and at the time to which he belonged. We have never seen any other instance of so powerful a determination towards a consummate cultivation of all the arts that are fit to crown admirable gifts with every advantage of complete discipline; and these things were in him so much beyond any thing we ever witnessed in others, that we consider it certain that his "strong nativity" of knowledge must have displayed itself betimes.

It appears that he learnt to read in his mother's arms, while borne about and tended in the manner that we have already described; and that, in the long feebleness of his lower limbs left even by returning health, the new-found treasure of books must have become his main delight. It was probably at this first period of study (as it is no abuse to call it for him, even from the first) that he contracted the taste which we have often heard him express for what had not yet been banished by the Barbauld and de Genlis child's literature-the older tales, we mean, of giants and pigmies, enchantments and fairy-land-the puissant Tom Thumb; or him of the giants, Jack; or the veracious voyager, Gulliver; or the delicious wonders of the Arabian story-tellers;

For that
Leave it

or that master-piece of probable fiction, Robinson Crusoe. In every thing of this sort, he was deeply read, and was accustomed to dictate afterwards on their superiority to what has displaced them, for the formation of the young mind-the sensible or instructive books, that would have children learn what men learn-that teach just science or fact enough to forestal, not inform, and take the edge off curiositybooks, in a word, which, before yet the fancy or the feelings have been formed, inculcate advanced and multiplied morals for those who are still incapable of experience and led chiefly by the senses. age the compositions are fittest which captivate the most. to the boy himself, and see what he will devour! In this, indeed, we have a guide obvious enough: the natural process of knowledge is necessarily just that which the rise of knowledge itself has followed among men it begins among rude nations with tales and songs, with what affects the imagination and the heart; and advances long afterwards to positive science. Barbarous nations are but larger and fairer children. If these things seem out of place here, we have been led to them, as the opinions of him concerning whom we write. They have their place in his life, since they were a part of his mind, and probably had their influence over its formation.

Indeed, the care of such a mother as it was Legare's happiness to have; made, as it was, doubly solicitous by his becoming, through the loss of his father, her undivided charge, and by the helpless condition to which she saw him, her chief hope, reduced by disease-has an image probably as just as it is sweet in the picture which a poet has drawn of the education of one of the opposite sex by a widowed father:

I may not paint those thousand infant charms,
(Unconscious fascination, undesigned!)
The orison, repeated in his arms,

For God to bless her sire and all mankind-
The book, the bosom on his knee reclined-

Or how sweet fairy-love he heard her con,

The play-mate, e'er the teacher, of her mind.
All uncompanion'd else her years had gone,

"Till now in Gertrude's eyes their ninth blue summer shone.”

The piety, the affection, the charity, the early love of knowledge, the tender care repaid with caresses as tender, and probably the fairylove were all parts of this excellent mother's system: for she was clearly wise enough to be "the play-mate e'er the teacher of his mind."

Campbell, Gertrude of Wyoming, Canto I.

Between his fourth year and his sixth, when he was first sent out to school, he had probably, with the boundless curiosity which he possessed, read much and formed, what is best formed by this earliest reading, a good English. For 'tis not at school that a boy ever gets a good knowledge of his own tongue, let him learn there whatever else he may. 'Tis much reading, and not teacher's work, which gives him that. But we find his first master, Mr. Ward, (an Englishman then teaching in Charleston,) declaring to his mother, when, in his ninth year, he became importunate to be taught Latin, and she resisted it because she supposed him unprepared, "that he was very far advanced in English, a boy of high talents, fine taste and great industry." His course with this instructor, then, was probably the usual rudimentary one in English-grammar, geography, the elements of history and arithmetic.

Yielding now to the opinion of Mr. Ward and to his own urgent wishes, his mother transferred him to the care of a Catholic priest, Dr. Gallagher, reputed, in that day, the most eminent classical teacher of Charleston. Under this master, with whom he seems to have remained two or three years, we know not precisely what was his progress: we only learn that it was such that the reverend Dr. himself, an enthusiast in Latin literature and in eloquence, but apparently somewhat national in his favorite models of the latter, took the greatest delight and pride in him, pronounced that he would bet "an honor to his country for erudition, and, as an orator, the Curran and Burke of America." Mr. Legaré himself was accustomed, at any event, to say that it was to Dr. Gallagher that he owed his passion for classical letters generally, and much of his knowledge of Latin; while it was to Dr. Waddel (his next teacher but one) that he was indebted for his love of Greek.

We have here on the part of Dr Gallagher, a very bold prediction, when uttered (as it certainly was) of a boy less than 12 years old: bold, we mean, of course, omitting that other glory of Hibernian oratory, who was such an exaggeration of Burke's greatest blemishes as the rhapsodical Counsellor Phillips was of his. It would be difficult, indeed. to fix on any one that has arisen among us so fit to be put in parallel with the great smiter of Jacobinism as was Legaré. Ample as was that illustrious man's erudition; wide and noble as his range of public knowledge; in these and in the entire command of one great practical pursuit (Jurisprudence) Legaré certainly excelled him; while he as certainly surpassed him in all that gives success to the uttered harangue. As an author, bating that they cannot fairly be compared