“When I was at school I felt exceedingly obliged to Homer’s messengers for the exact literal fidelity with which they delivered their messages.  The seven or eight lines of good Homeric Greek in which they had received the commands of Agamemnon or Achilles they recited to whomsoever the message was to be carried; and as they repeated them verbatim, sometimes twice or thrice, it saved me the trouble of learning so much Greek.”

It was not at “school” that he had this experience, but at Dartmouth College.  For mathematics, too, he had not the slightest taste.  He humorously wrote to a fellow-student, soon after leaving college, that “all that he knew about conterminous arches or evanescent subtenses might be collected on the pupil of a gnat’s eye without making him wink.”  At college, in fact, he was simply an omnivorous reader, studying only so much as to pass muster in the recitation-room.  Every indication we possess of his college life, as well as his own repeated assertions, confirms the conclusion that Nature had formed him to use the products of other men’s toil, not to add to the common fund.  Those who are conversant with college life know very well what it means when a youth does not take to Greek, and has an aversion to mathematics.  Such a youth may have immense talent, and give splendid expression to the sentiments of his countrymen, but he is not likely to be one of the priceless few of the human race who discover truth or advance opinion.  It is the energetic, the originating minds that are susceptible to the allurements of difficulty.

On the other hand, Daniel Webster had such qualities as made every one feel that he was the first man in the College.  Tall, gaunt, and sallow, with an incomparable forehead, and those cavernous and brilliant eyes of his, he had much of the large and tranquil presence which was so important an element of his power over others at all periods of his life.  His letters of this time, as well as the recollections of his fellow-students, show him the easy, humorous, rather indolent and strictly correct “good-fellow,” whom professors and companions equally relished.  He browsed much in the College library, and had the habit of bringing to bear upon the lesson of the hour the information gathered in his miscellaneous reading,—­a practice that much enlivens the monotony of recitation.  The half-dozen youths of his particular set, it appears, plumed themselves upon resembling the early Christians in having all things in common.  The first to rise in the morning—­and he must have been an early riser indeed who was up before Daniel Webster—­“dressed himself in the best which the united apartments afforded”; the next made the best selection from what remained; and the last was happy if he found rags enough to justify his appearance in the chapel.  The relator of this pleasant reminiscence adds, that he was once the possessor of an eminently respectable beaver hat, a costly article of resplendent lustre.  It was