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act for themselves. Sir Benjamin would often state the great ad- 

 vantage he had derived from being called upon at the age of sixteen 

 to join in managing a volunteer corps at the period of the first anti- 

 cipated French invasion in 1798. The difficulties of communication, 

 and the whole condition of the country, made such a task more 

 arduous, and therefore more instructive, than a young man would 

 find it at this day. 



But this occupation did not distract him from those studies 

 which there has been a tendency of late years to decry. In after 

 life he often looked back with satisfaction to the labour he had 

 bestowed on committing to memory passages of the Greek and 

 Latin authors, and of our own chief poets ; he would tell how, in 

 long professional journeys, before the days of railroads, he had been 

 cheered by the recital of them ; and he would point out how he 

 believed the imaginative faculty, so essential to any great artist, be 

 his art what it may, had been disciplined as well as fostered by early 

 industry in ordinary classical studies. 



Being naturally, or from a sense of duty, a studious boy, he, of his 

 own accord, amassed, in leisure hours spent in his father's library, 

 a great variety of knowledge ; and he even then acquired a taste for 

 those psychological speculations which shed a genial glow ever his 

 later days, when the labour of life was over and when his mind dwelt 

 with serene delight on the contemplation of those higher qualities 

 which are the peculiar property of man, and which are strengthened 

 or impaired according to the use made of them by each possessor. 



Thus prepared, in the autumn of 1801 our future President en- 

 tered such a school of medicine as sixty years ago London afforded. 

 He had no special predilection for either medicine or physical 

 science. The arrangements of his family, rather than an active choice, 

 led him to adopt his father's suggestions as to his future profession. 

 He had already acquired a taste for work as such, he knew that he 

 had to strive for his own maintenance, and forthwith betook himself 

 with rational zeal to the selected study. Had his lot engaged him 

 in the study of some other subject-matter than medicine, that other 

 subject would assuredly have been equally mastered by the same 

 steady grasp, and elucidated by the same clear mind. 



It is not easy for one conversant only with the existing appliances 

 for medical instruction to appreciate the circumstances of a lad who 



