And what are, after all, these social relations which call for so much courage, and which can create so much suffering to most of us as we conquer for them our awkwardness and our shyness?  Let us pause for a moment, and try to be just.  Let us contemplate these social ethics, which call for so much that is, perhaps, artificial and troublesome and contradictory.  Society, so long as it is the congregation of the good, the witty, the bright, the intelligent, and the gifted, is the thing most necessary to us all.  We are apt to like it and its excitements almost too well, or to hate it, with its excesses and its mistakes, too bitterly.  We are rarely just to society.

The rounded, and harmonious, and temperate understanding and use of society is, however, the very aim and end of education.  We are born to live with each other and not for ourselves.  If we are cheerful, our cheerfulness was given to us to make bright the lives of those about us; if we have genius, that is a sacred trust; if we have beauty, wit, joyousness, it was given us for the delectation of others, not for ourselves; if we are awkward and shy, we are bound to break the crust, and to show that within us is beauty, cheerfulness, and wit.  “It is but the fool who loves excess.”  The best human being should moderately like society.—­MRS. JOHN SHERWOOD.

* * * * *

XXVIII.

JOHN MARSHALL

(BORN 1755—­DIED 1835.)

IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY—­HIS MARRIAGE—­LAW LECTURES—­AT THE BAR—­HIS INTELLECTUAL POWERS—­ON THE BENCH.

The family stock of Marshall, like that of Jefferson, was Welsh, as is generally the case in names with a double letter, as a double f or a double l.  This Welsh type was made steady by English infusions.  The first Marshall came from Wales in 1730, and settled in the same county where Washington, Monroe, and the Lees were born.  He was a poor man, and lived in a tract called “The Forest.”  His eldest son, Thomas, went out to Fauquier County, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, and settled on Goose Creek, under Manassas Gap.  This Thomas Marshall had been a playmate of George Washington, and, like him, was a mountain surveyor, and they loved each other, and when the Revolutionary War broke out both went into the service, Thomas Marshall being colonel of one of the Virginia regiments.  His son, John Marshall, who was not twenty years old when the conflict began, became a lieutenant under his father.  The mother of John Marshall was named Mary Kieth, and his grandmother Elizabeth Markham, and the latter was born in England.