MEMOEIAL OF GEORGE GIBBS. 221 



and genial gentleman he continued the most friendly and intimate 

 relations until liis death. A great part of his time, however, he passed 

 in the country. His enrly taste for an out-door life always clung to 

 him. Shooting and fishing were his favorite amusements, diversified 

 with a practical and useful attention to geology and natural history. 

 When the family removed to the cil^^ from Sunsvdck, in 1835, he had 

 already made and mounted with his own hands a large collection of 

 birds, and he had also gathered together a considerable mineralogical 

 cabinet. The latter he sent to New Haven, as a gift to be added to his 

 father's collection. These early tastes mark the natural tendency of his 

 mind, and his whole career shows how strongly they were implanted in 

 his nature; how^ foreign to his general intellectual bias must have been 

 the i3lodding and confinement of the study of the law. Earlj^ he seems 

 to have mgde his election as between science and law, although the 

 crippled condition in which his father's death left the family estates did 

 not allow of his deserting that i^rofession which he had adopted and to 

 which he looked for his ow^n support. Nor could he ever have contented 

 himself with the dry study of Blackstone and Cbitty, or any other of 

 the law worthies. His taste for literature was too catholic for this, and 

 his intellectual rambles about his fathers library had opened too many 

 vistas of charming pasturage for him to stay his appetite with the dry 

 food of legal disquisition. He showed this taste even in the practice of 

 his profession. He gave himself up with hearty zeal to the historical 

 branch of conveyancin-j', and made valuable collections of titles and 

 abstracts in this department of law. 



George Gibbs loved literature. He was familiar with all the good 

 old books which our fathers w; re wont to read. He loved the strong 

 and Saxon language of the earlier day — of Latimer and Hall, of Swift 

 and Sterne, of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. The cast of his mind 

 was puritanic in its stern hatred of new-fangled notions and new fash- 

 ioned phrases. He loved with his grand sonorous voice to roll out the 

 verses of the old covenanter hymns or the paraphrases of the psalms 

 of Sir Philip Sydney, a "pure well of English undefiled." He loved 

 politics also. Ardent in all that he engaged in, he soon found himself 

 occupied in a history of the times of Washington and Adams, and a 

 vindication of the policy of his grandfather as Secretary of the Treasury 

 and a member of the cabinet of John Adams. The hot feud between 

 the federalists and the republicans had not died out, and the young- 

 polemic took up the "burning brand," which in those days was indeed 

 passed on from sire to son as thoroughly as ever by Scottish partisan in 

 Scottish feud. To use his own words, Mr. Gibbs " felt himself not only 

 the vindicator, but in some sort the avenger, of a bygone i^arty and a 

 buried race." 



This work occupied a great part of his time. He embraced in it the 

 correspondence of Oliver Wolcott, and it stands to-day as a text-book 

 of the history of the day — as an unquestioned authority upon the per- 



