78 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



And think st thou not how wretched we shall be,- 

 A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? 



These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache s address 

 and circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, 

 which seemed relieved by the tears my repetition of them 

 drew from her. 



Pope s Homer is not Homer, perhaps; but how many 

 noble natures have felt its elation, how many bruised spirits 

 the solace of its bracing, if monotonous melody ! To us 

 there is something inexpressibly tender in this instinct of the 

 widowed mother to find consolation in the idealization of her 

 grief by mingling it with those sorrows which genius has 

 turned into the perennial delight of mankind. This was a 

 kind of sentiment that was healthy for her boy, refining 

 without unnerving, and associating his father s memory with 

 a noble company unassailable by time. It was through this 

 lady, whose image looks down on us out of the past, so full 

 of sweetness and refinement, that Mr. Quincy became of kin 

 with Mr. Wendell Phillips, so justly eminent as a speaker. 

 There is something nearer than cater-cousinship in a certain 

 impetuous audacity of temper common to them both. 



When six years old, Mr. Quincy was sent to Phillips 

 Academy at Andover, where he remained till he entered col 

 lege. His form-fellow here was a man of thirty, who had 

 been a surgeon in the Continental army, and whose character 

 and adventures might almost seem borrowed from a romance 

 of Smollett. Under Principal Pearson, the lad, though a 

 near-relative of the founder of the school, seems to have en 

 dured all that severity of the old a posteriori method of 

 teaching which still smarted in Tusser s memory when he 

 sang, 



From Paul s I went, to Eton sent, 

 To learn straightways the Latin phrase, 

 Where fifty-three stripes given to me 

 At once I had. 



The young victim of the wisdom of Solomon was boarded 

 with the parish minister, in whose kindness he found a leni 

 tive for the scholastic discipline he underwent. This gentle 

 man had been a soldier in the Colonial service, and Mr. 

 Quincy afterwards gave as a reason for his mildness, that, 

 while a sergeant at Castle William, he had seen something 

 of mankind. This, no doubt, would be a better preparative 

 for successful dealing with the young than is generally 



