as my apology, if I should appear to pay a disproportioned atten- 

 tion to Mr. Pickering's academical life. 



His advantages, upon entering the University, were certainly 

 great, and in some respects peculiar. But they did not consist in 

 his extraordinary intellectual acquirements, or his fine natural pow- 

 ers, or in both together, so much as in his complete moral and re- 

 ligious training, his cherished love of learning, his correct habits, 

 his filial piety, which made the wishes of his parents and uncle his 

 own, and that wisdom, so rare in youth, which led him to follow 

 experienced guides rather than prejudiced companions, and not 

 only to shun all noxious habits, but, like his prototype, Sir William 

 Jones, to avail himself of every " opportunity of improving his in- 

 tellectual faculties, or of acquiring esteemed accomplishments." 

 Such as these were his preeminent advantages. Some of those 

 students who have most signally failed in their collegiate course 

 were, like him, distinguished for their mental powers and prepara- 

 tory acquirements, wanting only his moral strength and his wisdom. 

 How it might have been with him, had his mother, instead of her 

 gentle religious nurture, given him lessons of frivolity and fashion, 

 and had his father and his uncle been as observable for their selfish 

 indulgences as they were remarkable for their public and private 

 virtues and their exalted Christian character, and had his teachers, 

 moreover, instilled into him the poison of an irreligious example, 

 we can only conjecture. So, too, we can only conjecture what 

 sort of a character King George the Fourth might have become, 

 had he received the nurture and education which blessed the youth 

 of John Pickering. But while we believe that the laws of the 

 moral universe are as fixed in their operation as those of the mate- 

 rial world, we cannot doubt that the result, in either case, would 

 have been essentially the reverse of what it was. 



