into song, the wild melody of which floats, in the stillness of night, upon the breeze to the listening ear a mile away, in cadences mournfully sweet, make the camp-meeting among the most exciting of human exhibitions.  In such a school were trained those great masters of pulpit oratory, Pierce, Wynans, Capers, and Bascomb.  Whitfield was the great exemplar of these; but none, perhaps, so imitated his style and manner as John Newland Maffit and the wonderful Summerfield.

Like all that is great and enduring, the Methodist Church had its beginning among the humble and lowly.  Rocked in the cradle of penury and ignorance, it was firmly fixed in the foundations of society, whence it rose from its own purity of doctrine and simplicity of worship to command the respect, love, and adoption of the highest in the land, and to wield an influence paramount in the destinies of the people and the Government.  Its ministers are now the educated and eloquent of the Church militant.  Its institutions of learning are the first and most numerous all over the South, and it has done for female education in the South more than every other sect of Christians, excepting, perhaps, the Roman Catholic.  In the cause of education its zeal is enlisted, and its organization is such as to bring a wonderful power to operate upon the community in every section of the South and West.  That this will accomplish much, we have only to look to the antecedents of the Church to determine.  Like the coral insect, they never cease to labor:  each comes with his mite and deposits it; and, from the humblest beginning, this assiduity and contribution builds up great islands in the sea of ignorance—­rich in soil, salubrious in climate, and, finally, triumphant in the conceptions of the chief architect—­completing for good the work so humbly begun.

CHAPTER IX.

PEDAGOGUES AND DEMAGOGUES.

EDUCATION—­COLLEGES—­SCHOOL-DAYS—­WILLIAM AND MARY—­A SUBSTITUTE—­ BOARDING AROUND—­ROUGH DIAMONDS—­CASTE—­GEORGE M. TROUP—­A SCOTCH INDIAN—­ALEXANDER McGILVERY—­THE McINTOSH FAMILY—­BUTTON GWINNETT—­ GENERAL TAYLOR—­MATTHEW TALBOT—­JESSE MERCER—­AN EXCITING ELECTION.

The subject of education engaged the attention of the people of Georgia at a very early day subsequent to the Revolution.  Public schools were not then thought of; probably because such a scheme would have been impracticable.  The population was sparse, and widely separated in all the rural districts of the country; and to have supplied all with the means of education, would have necessitated an expense beyond the power of the State.  A system was adopted, of establishing and endowing academies in the different counties, at the county-seat, where young men who intended to complete a collegiate education might be taught, and the establishment and endowment of a college, where this education might be finished, leaving the rudimental education of the children of the State