90 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



and circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, 

 which seemed relieved by the tears my repetition of them 

 drew from her.&quot; 



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 idealisation 

 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 s 

 Academy at Andover, where he remained till he entered 

 college. 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 endured all that severity of the old a posteriori 

 method of teaching which still smarted in Tusser s memory 

 when he sang 



&quot; 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.&quot; 



The young victim of the wisdom of Solomon was boarded 

 with the parish minister, in whose kindness he found a 

 lenitive for the scholastic discipline he underwent. This 

 gentleman had been a soldier in the Colonial service, and 

 Mr. Quincy afterwards gave as a reason for his mildness. 



