Union was, at this epoch, and during the active life of the doctor, the third university of the United States, coming, in the general estimation and the number of its graduates, immediately after Yale, Harvard being then, as always, the first; and it owed its character and peculiar reputation to the strong and singular personality of its first president.  I have, in the course of my life, become more or less acquainted with many able men, and Dr. Nott was the most remarkable of all the teachers I have ever known, considering the limitation of his position and profession,—­that of a Presbyterian clergyman in a time when sectarian differences ran high, and his sect had no lead in public opinion.  He had attained his position by the force of his character assisted by his extraordinary tact and eloquence, but unaided by patronage, and this at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a time when institutions were forming and nothing was settled in the character of society.  The manual of public speakers which we used to draw on for the speeches in class recitations included, as one of the most brilliant examples, the doctor’s oration on the death of Alexander Hamilton, killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, one of the earliest and the most prominent of the demagogues of America.  I have not read the oration for fifty years; but, as I remember it, it was, in the fashion of the day, one of the most eloquent of all our readings.

As I was a favorite of the doctor in the last year of my course and for years after, and as no one has ever in my estimation done him justice, it is to me a debt of gratitude, as well as a matter of justice, to repair as best I may this neglect.  No one but a pupil could ever have fairly estimated his force of character, and no pupil whose intercourse with him was not carried into the post-graduate years could measure the ability with which he advised, especially in political matters, with his old pupils.  In the days of his activity, no institution in the country furnished so large an element to the practical statesmanship of the United States as did Union.  Seward was one of his favorite pupils, and it is well known that, up to the period of the American Civil War, he never took a step in politics without the advice of the doctor.  Having had a struggle with poverty in his own early life, Dr. Nott sympathized heartily with the poorer students, and a practical education was more easily gained at Union than was then possible at Yale or Harvard.  Men were allowed to defer payment of the fees till later life when their means had increased; and, though there were no scholarships, there were many students whose burdens were so far alleviated by the regulations that an earnest man who was determined to take his degree and work his way if he must, needed never leave college unsatisfied.