But Aaron Burr, amidst all the toils of his profession, and in spite of the distractions of political strife, made the education of his daughter the darling object of his existence.  Hunters tell us that pointers and hounds inherit the instinct which renders them such valuable allies in the pursuit of game; so that the offspring of a trained dog acquires the arts of the chase with very little instruction.  Burr’s father was one of the most zealous and skillful of schoolmasters, and from him he appears to have derived that pedagogic cast of character which led him, all his life, to take so much interest in the training of proteges.  There was never a time in his whole career when he had not some youth upon his hands to whose education he was devoted.  His system of training, with many excellent points, was radically defective.  Its defects are sufficiently indicated when we say that It was pagan, not Christian.  Plato, Socrates, Cato, and Cicero might have pronounced it good and sufficient:  St. John, St. Augustine, and all the Christian host would have lamented it as fatally defective.  But if Burr educated his child as though she were a Roman girl, her mother was with her during the first eleven years of her life, to supply, in some degree, what was wanting in the instructions of her father.

Burr was a stoic.  He cultivated hardness.  Fortitude and fidelity were his favorite virtues.  The seal which he used in his correspondence with his intimate friends, and with them only, was descriptive of his character and prophetic of his destiny.  It was a Rock, solitary in the midst of a tempestuous ocean, and bore the inscription, “Nee flatu nee fluctu”—­neither by wind nor by wave.  It was his principle to steel himself against the inevitable evils of life.  If we were asked to select from his writings the sentence which contains most of his characteristic way of thinking, it would be one which he wrote in his twenty-fourth year to his future wife:  “That mind is truly great which can bear with equanimity the trifling and unavoidable vexations of life, and be affected only by those which determine our substantial bliss.”  He utterly despised all complaining, even of the greatest calamities.  He even experienced a kind of proud pleasure in enduring the fierce obloquy of his later years.  One day, near the close of his life, when a friend had told him of some new scandal respecting his moral conduct, he said:  “That’s right, my child, tell me what they say.  I like to know what the public say of me,—­the great public!” Such words he would utter without the slightest bitterness, speaking of the great public as a humorous old grandfather might of a wayward, foolish, good little child.