performed a part in the Commencement exercises, which greatly raised the expectation of his friends, and gratified and animated his love for distinction.  “In the course of a long and active life,” says he, “I recollect no occasion when I have experienced such elevation of feeling.”  This was the effect of that spirit of emulation which incited the whole course of his life of usefulness.  There is now prevalent among us a morbid and sickly notion, that emulation, even as honorable rivalry, is a debasing passion, and not to be encouraged.  It supposes that the mind should be left without such excitement, in a dreamy and undisturbed state, flowing or not flowing, according to its own impulse, without such aids as are furnished by the rivalry of one with another.  For one, I do not believe in this.  I hold to the doctrine of the old school, as to this part of education.  Quinctilian says:  “Sunt quidam, nisi institeris, remissi; quidam imperio indignantur:  quosdam continet metus, quosdam debilitat:  alios continuatio extundit, in aliis plus impetus facit.  Mihi ille detur puer, quem laus excitet, quem gloria juvet, qui victus fleat; hic erit alendus ambitu, hunc mordebit objurgatio, hunc honor excitabit; in hoc desidiam nunquam verebor.”  I think this is sound sense and just feeling.

Mr. Mason was destined for the law, and commenced the study of that profession with Mr. Baldwin, a gentleman who has lived to perform important public and private duties, has served his country in Congress, and on the bench of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, and still lives to hear the account of the peaceful death of his distinguished pupil.  After a year, he went to Vermont, in whose recently established tribunals he expected to find a new sphere for the gratification of ambition, and the employment of talents.  He studied in the office of Stephen Rowe Bradley, afterwards a Senator in Congress; and was admitted to the bar, in Vermont and New Hampshire, in the year 1791.

He began his career in Westmoreland, a few miles below Walpole, at the age of twenty-three; but in 1794, three years afterwards, removed to Walpole, as being a larger village, where there was more society and more business.  There was at that time on the Connecticut River a rather unusual number of gentlemen, distinguished for polite accomplishments and correct tastes in literature, and among them some well known to the public as respectable writers and authors.  Among these were Mr. Benjamin West, Mr. Dennie, Mr. Royall Tyler, Mr. Jacobs, Mr. Samuel Hunt, Mr. J.W.  Blake, Mr. Colman (who established, and for a long time edited, the “New York Evening Post"), and Mr. Olcott.  In the association with these gentlemen, and those like them, Mr. Mason found an agreeable position, and cultivated tastes and habits of the highest character.