92 EULOGY ON PROFESSOR ALEXANDER DALLAS BACHE. 



as members of Lis class, in liis repntation for higli standing and exem- 

 plary conduct. His room-mate, older by several years than he was, and 

 by no means noted for regularity or studious habits, constituted himself, 

 as it were, his guardian, and sedulously excluded all visitors or other 

 interruptions to study during the prescribed hours. For this self- 

 imposed service, gravely rendered as essential to the honor of the class, 

 he was accustomed jocularly to claim immunity for his own delin- 

 quencies or shortcomings. But whatever protection others might 

 require on account of youth and inexperience, young Baclie needed no 

 guardian to keep him in the line of duty. Impressed beyond his years 

 with a sense of the responsibility which \^ould devolve uj^on him as the 

 eldest of his mother's family, entertaining a grave appreciation of the 

 obligations involved in his edn(;atiou at the i^ational Academy, he 

 resolved from the first to exert his energies to the utmost in qualifying 

 himself Ibr the duties which he might be called upon to discharge, 

 whether in professional or private life. Nor was he uninfluenced in this 

 determination by a consciousness that as a descendant of Franklin he 

 was, in a certain degree, an object of popular interest, and that on this 

 account something more than an ordinary responsibility rested upon 

 him. On a mind constituted like his an influence of this kind could 

 not but exert a happy effect. 



The character which he established for gentleness of manner and 

 evenness of temper was not entirely the result of native amiability, for 

 when a child he is said to have been quick-tempered, and at later 

 perirods of his life, when suddenly provoked beyond his habitual power 

 of endurance, he sometimes gave way to manifestations of temper which 

 might have surprised those who only knew him in his usual state of 

 calm deportment. These ebullitions were, however, of rare occurrence, 

 and always of short duration. His marked characteristic was the con- 

 trol which he had acquired over his passions and feelings, and it was 

 this which enabled him to suppress all tendency to self-indulgence, to 

 pursue with unremitting perseverance the course he had marked out, to 

 observe an undeviating regard for truth and justice, and to cherish 

 habitually all that would tend to exemplify the kindlier affections of the 

 heart. 



Although young Bache was perhaps predisposed, from hereditary 

 influence, to form correct habits and adopt high moral princi})les, yet 

 these dispositions might have remained dormant had it not been for the 

 early training and the watchful care of his noble mother. From his 

 earliest days she checked with gentle reproof every indication of child- 

 ish revolt against wholesome restraint, and steadily carried out her sys- 

 tem of discipline so gently and yet so effectually that it met with 

 scarcely any opposition, and left the conviction that she was always in 

 the right. Her maternal solicitude did not end with his being placed 

 under military rule, but was continued through his whole course by 

 means of a ready pen. In the language of one who was permitted to 



