102 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



idealization of her grief by mingling it with those sor- 

 rows 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 as- 

 sociating his father's memory with a noble company un- 

 assailable 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-cousin- 

 ship 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 

 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 bor- 

 rowed 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, 



" From Paul's I went, to Eton sent, 

 To learn straight-ways 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 

 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, 

 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 thought However, the birch was 



