OF AKTS AND SCIENCES. 157 



an otherwise inaccessible social position for themselves or families ; and 

 others by an overleaping ambition, knowing no rest and faltering at no 

 obstruction. But he whom we mourn was urged on by no such incite- 

 ment. The position and wealth of his family secured to him, without 

 effort on his part, all he could desire of rank or competency in social 

 life ; and he had none of the restless craving for distinction, or for sur- 

 passing others, too often the sole incentive of vulgar ambition : nor was 

 he pressed by the solicitations or flatteries of friends to seek for himself 

 a name among the eminent of the earth. 



" But his noble struggle and glorious victory over the embarrass- 

 ments which environed him in the outset of his career, and which to 

 many would have seemed insurmountable, resulted from the natural 

 and unstrained workings of a self-poised mind, conscious of its powers 

 and duties ; loving, for their own sakes, the play of its mental and 

 moral faculties, and the truths to which it led ; and looking upon the 

 obstacles in his path only as suggesting the means of overcoming them. 



"And here, too, we may find an explanation of the remarkable 

 equanimity and simplicity evinced amid the world-wide honor and 

 adulation showered upon him at home and abroad. They are attrib- 

 utable to no studied efibrt of self-control, and no premeditated disci- 

 pline of mind or heart, but were the natural result of this never-failing 

 moral self-possession, raising him above them. These honors had not 

 been the moving object of his efforts, nor the rewards he had been 

 seeking, great and precious as they may be justly esteemed. The 

 compensation he had sought for was found in the joyous exercise of 

 his faculties, and the gratifying results to which it led in his own mind 

 and heart. These outw^ard manifestations of his success were but the 

 adventitious circumstances attending those results. He was not, nor 

 indeed could he have been, unmindful of them, or of the just gratifica- 

 tions to be derived from them ; nor did he affect to disregard or under- 

 value them. He was modestly conscious of his honors, and enjoyed 

 them in communion with his friends, but most simply and unassum- 

 ingly. 



" The character and manners of Mr. P^escott were distinguished 

 by a manly, prompt, and universal benevolence, — never checked nor 

 chilled, but pleasurably excited by the success of others ; and never 

 yielding to any gratification in their failures or errors, but throwing 

 over all the mantle of loving-kindness and charitable construction. 



