tutor, I was trained to quite a high degree of precision.  I was expected to understand the mechanism of the language thoroughly, and in translating to give the thoughts in as few well-arranged words as possible, and without breaks or hesitation,—­for with these my father had absolutely no patience.

’Indeed, he demanded accuracy and clearness in everything:  you must not speak, unless you can make your meaning perfectly intelligible to the person addressed; must not express a thought, unless you can give a reason for it, if required; must not make a statement, unless sure of all particulars—­such were his rules.  “But,” “if,” “unless,” “I am mistaken,” and “it may be so,” were words and phrases excluded from the province where he held sway.  Trained to great dexterity in artificial methods, accurate, ready, with entire command of his resources, he had no belief in minds that listen, wait, and receive.  He had no conception of the subtle and indirect motions of imagination and feeling.  His influence on me was great, and opposed to the natural unfolding of my character, which was fervent, of strong grasp, and disposed to infatuation, and self-forgetfulness.  He made the common prose world so present to me, that my natural bias was controlled.  I did not go mad, as many would do, at being continually roused from my dreams.  I had too much strength to be crushed,—­and since I must put on the fetters, could not submit to let them impede my motions.  My own world sank deep within, away from the surface of my life; in what I did and said I learned to have reference to other minds.  But my true life was only the dearer that it was secluded and veiled over by a thick curtain of available intellect, and that coarse, but wearable stuff woven by the ages,—­Common Sense.

’In accordance with this discipline in heroic common sense, was the influence of those great Romans, whose thoughts and lives were my daily food during those plastic years.  The genius of Rome displayed itself in Character, and scarcely needed an occasional wave of the torch of thought to show its lineaments, so marble strong they gleamed in every light.  Who, that has lived with those men, but admires the plain force of fact, of thought passed into action?  They take up things with their naked hands.  There is just the man, and the block he casts before you,—­no divinity, no demon, no unfulfilled aim, but just the man and Rome, and what he did for Rome.  Everything turns your attention to what a man can become, not by yielding himself freely to impressions, not by letting nature play freely through him, but by a single thought, an earnest purpose, an indomitable will, by hardihood, self-command, and force of expression.  Architecture was the art in which Rome excelled, and this corresponds with the feeling these men of Rome excite.  They did not grow,—­they built themselves up, or were built up by the fate of Rome, as a temple for Jupiter Stator.