Chapter 2

"Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus;
Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits;--
I rather would entreat thy company
To see the wonders of the world abroad."
_Two Gentlemen of--Clawbonny._

During the year that succeeded after I was prepared for Yale,
Mr. Hardinge had pursued a very judicious course with my
education. Instead of pushing me into books that were to be read in
the regular course of that institution, with the idea of lightening my
future labours, which would only have been providing excuses for
future idleness, we went back to the elementary works, until even he
was satisfied that nothing more remained to be done in that
direction. I had my two grammars literally by heart, notes and all.
Then we revised as thoroughly as possible, reading everything anew,
and leaving no passage unexplained. I learned to scan, too, a fact
that was sufficient to make a reputation for a scholar, in America,
half a century since. [*] After this, we turned our attention to
mathematics, a science Mr. Hardinge rightly enough thought there was
no danger of my acquiring too thoroughly. We mastered arithmetic, of
which I had a good deal of previous knowledge, in a few weeks, and
then I went through trigonometry, with some of the more useful
problems in geometry. This was the point at which I had arrived when
my mother's death occurred.

[Footnote *: The writer's master taught him to scan Virgil in
1801. This gentleman was a graduate of Oxford. In 1803, the class to
which the writer then belonged in Yale, was the first that ever
attempted to scan in that institution. The quantities were in sad
discredit in this country, years after this, though Columbia and
Harvard were a little in advance of Yale. All that was ever done in
the last college, during the writer's time, was to scan the ordinary
hexameter of Homer and Virgil.]

As for myself, I frankly admit a strong disinclination to be
learned. The law I might be forced to study, but practising it was a
thing my mind had long been made up never to do. There was a small
vein of obstinacy in my disposition that would have been very likely
to carry me through in such a determination, even had my mother lived,
though deference to her wishes would certainly have carried me as far
as the license. Even now she was no more, I was anxious to ascertain
whether she had left any directions or requests on the subject, either
of which would have been laws to me. I talked with Rupert on this
matter, and was a little shocked with the levity with which he treated
it. "What difference can it make to your parents, _now_," he
said, with an emphasis that grated on my nerves, "whether you become a
lawyer, or a merchant, or a doctor, or stay