In the same unquestioning manner, he imbibed his father’s political prejudices.  We hear this young Federalist call the Republican party “the Jacobins,” just as the reactionists and tories of the present day speak of the present Republican party as “the radicals.”  It is amusing to hear him, in 1802, predict the speedy restoration to power of a party that was never again to taste its sweets.  “Jacobinism and iniquity,” he wrote in his twentieth year, “are so allied in signification, that the latter always follows the former, just as in grammar ‘the accusative case follows the transitive verb.’” He speaks of a young friend as “too honest for a Democrat.”  As late as his twenty-second year, he was wholly unreconciled to Napoleon, and still wrote with truly English scorn of “Gallic tastes and Gallic principles.”  There is a fine burst in one of his letters of 1804, when he had been propelled by his brother to Boston to finish his law studies:—­

“Jerome, the brother of the Emperor of the Gauls, is here; every day you may see him whisking along Cornhill, with the true French air, with his wife by his side.  The lads say that they intend to prevail on American misses to receive company in future after the manner of Jerome’s wife, that is, in bed.  The gentlemen of Boston (i.e. we Feds) treat Monsieur with cold and distant respect.  They feel, and every honest man feels, indignant at seeing this lordly grasshopper, this puppet in prince’s clothes, dashing through the American cities, luxuriously rioting on the property of Dutch mechanics or Swiss peasants.”

This last sentence, written when he was twenty-two years old, is the first to be found in his published letters which tells anything of the fire that was latent in him.  He was of slow growth; he was forty-eight years of age before his powers had reached their full development.

When he had nearly completed his studies for the bar, he was again upon the point of abandoning the laborious career of a lawyer for a life of obscurity and ease.  On this occasion, it was the clerkship of his father’s court, salary fifteen hundred dollars a year, that tempted him.  He jumped at the offer, which promised an immediate competency for the whole family, pinched and anxious for so many years.  He had no thought but to accept it.  With the letter in his hand, and triumphant joy in his face, he communicated the news to Mr. Gore, his instructor in the law; thinking of nothing, he tells us, but of “rushing to the immediate enjoyment of the proffered office.”  Mr. Gore, however, exhibited a provoking coolness on the subject.  He said it was very civil in the judges to offer such a compliment to a brother on the bench, and, of course, a respectful letter of acknowledgment must be sent.  The glowing countenance of the young man fell at these most unexpected and unwelcome words.  They were, to use his own language, “a shower-bath of ice-water.”  The old lawyer, observing his crestfallen condition, reasoned