place; there drawing and dancing, riding and fencing are taught; there is due suppression of those rooted obstacles to all useful acquisition, Latin and Greek; there is that sweet and noble thing, so dear to ingenuous youth, DISCIPLINE; there, if anywhere, a rude cub of a boy can be transformed into that beautiful creature, the true fighting animal, but the man nowhere out of place-a Gentleman! In them, too, the education that fits a man for life proceeds simultaneously with that which prepares him for his professionschooling and apprenticeship going hand in hand-which is the only system by which any considerable proportion of the youth of a country can ever be liberally educated. Would that venerable Harvard, venerable Yale, Amherst, Williams, Columbia, and the rest, would heed the lessons the times are teaching us, and place themselves, by a sweeping revolution, upon a footing worthy of the age, and prepare to give the education which the youth of the country are so eager to receive. If existing institutions refuse it, a hundred West Points will spring into being, and the glory of the good old colleges will depart for ever.

The boy was decided in favor of West Point. Nor was a cadetship unattainable, in the days of Jackson and Isaac Hill, to the son of Captain John Butler. But the cautious mother hesitated. She feared he would forget his religion, and disappoint her dream of seeing him in the pulpit of a Baptist church. She consulted her minister upon the subject. He agreed with her, and recommended Waterville college, in Maine, recently founded by the Baptists, with a special view to the education of young men for the ministry. It promised, also, the advantage of a manual labor department, in which the youth, by working three hours a day, could earn part of his expenses. At Waterville, moreover, there could be no danger of the student's neglecting religion, since the great object of the college was the inculcation of religion, and all the influences of the place were religious. The president himself was a clergyman, several of the professors were clergymen. Attendance at church on Sundays was compulsory, and there was even a fine of ten cents for every unexcused absence from prayers. With such safeguards, what danger could there be to the religious principles instilled into the mind of the young man from his earliest childhood? Thus argued the minister. The mother gave heed to his opinions, and the youth was consigned to Waterville.

He was a slender lad of sixteen, small of stature, health infirm, of fair complexion, and hair of reddish brown; his character conspicuously shown in the remarkable form of his head. Over his eyes an immense development of the perceptive powers, and the upper forehead retreating almost like that of a flat-head Indian. A youth of keen vision, fiery, inquisitive, fearless; nothing yet developed in him but ardent curiosity to know, and perfect memory to retain. Phrenologists would find proof of their theory in comparing the portrait of the youth with the well-rounded head of the man mature, his organs developed by a quarter of a century of intense and constant use of them. His purse was most slenderly furnished. His mother could afford him little help. A good New Hampshire uncle gave him some assistance now and then, and he worked his three hours a day in the manual labor department at chair-making, earning wages ridiculously small. He was compelled to remain in debt for a considerable part of his college expenses.

Mr. Carlyle observes that the natural history of a hawk written by a sparrow could not be flattering to the hawk. Nor could it be just. Sedate and orthodox professors are the natural prey of a lad like this, born into a minority, trained to the audacious advocacy of unpopular opinions, and accustomed to regard the powers that be in the light of objects of attack. I fear, therefore, that the college career of this student, if it should be related by his instructors, would not present him to us in a favorable light. Perhaps, there is something in the clerical character and training which, in some degree, disqualify a man for gaining an ascendency over the minds of youth. The example of Arnold may be cited against such an opinion, but Arnold was an exceptional man, in an exceptional sphere.

The professors attached to New England colleges present certain varieties of character and position:-The president, a grave and awful Doctor of Divinity, highest in place, sometimes lowest in accomplishment, owing his appointment to his ecclesiastical importance rather than to his learning; sometimes the butt of the college, often deeply loved and venerated. There is the professor renowned beyond the college walls, its advertisement and boast, not always highly valued in the class-room. There is the absorbed professor, book-worm and devotee of his subject, who knows not the name of the president of the United States, and never heard of Dickens and

Thackeray. There is the unpopular professor, a prying, meddling gentleman, keen in the scent of a furtive cigar, prompt to appear at the moment he is least expected and desired. There is the beloved professor, the students' gentle friend and father, whom to insult or annoy rouses the retributive wrath of the whole class. There is the professor of doubtful scholarship, often wrong in his dicta, the tortured victim of the knowing ones, who have explored the shallows of his mind, and know what questions he cannot answer. There is the dandy professor, deliverer of flowery orations, or of sermons trivial and showy. There is the professor who is writing a book, and gets students of the softer sort to copy for him. There is the professor who once wrote an article for the "North American Review," and gives the number containing it to his favorites. There is the foreign-born professor of immense learning, not too fond of attending morning prayers, totally unable to keep order in his class. And there is the lynx-eyed professor, whom no one attempts to cheat; and the absent-minded professor, who sits cogitating his next sermon, regardless of the written translation, or the forbidden "key."

Waterville was a young college, but it could boast most of these varieties; and to as many as there were, our young friend was occasionally an affliction. Most of them were clergymen and theologians more than they were instructors of youth; their object being to make good Baptists as well as good scholars.

But the college was of vast benefit to our young friend, as any college must have been, conducted in the interests of virtue, and attended by a hundred and seventy-five young men from the simple and industrious homes of New England; most of them eager to improve, and perfectly aware that upon themselves alone depended the success of their future career. If he was prone to undervalue some parts of the college course, he made most liberal use of the college library. He was an omnivorous reader. All the natural sciences were interesting to him, particularly chemistry; and his fondness for such studies inclined him long to choose the medical profession. No student went better prepared to the class-room of the professor of natural philosophy.

Seduced by his example, there arose a party in the college opposed to the regular course of studies, advocates of an unregulated browse among the books of the library, each student to read only

such subjects as interested him. There was a split in the Literary Society. Of the retiring body, after immense electioneering, young Butler was elected president, and the question was then debated with extreme earnestness for several weeks, whether the mind would fare better by confining itself to the college routine, or by reading whatever it had appetite for. I know not which party carried the day; but our friend was foremost in maintaining both by speech and example, that knowledge was knowledge, however ob tained, and that the mind could get most advantage by partaking of the kind of nutriment it craved. He laid a wager with a noted * plodder of the college, that he would continue for a given term his desultory reading, and yet beat him in the regular lessons of the class. The wager was won by an artifice. He did continue his desultory reading, as well as his desultory wanderings about the country, but late at night, when all the college slept, he spent some hours in vigorous cram for the next day's lesson. His memory was such, that he found it easier to commit to memory such lessons as "Wayland's Moral Philosophy," than to prepare them in the usual way. He astonished his plodding friend one day, by repeating thirteen pages of Wayland, without once hesitating.

He came into collision with his reverend instructors on a point of college discipline. The fine of ten cents imposed for absence from prayers, was a serious matter to a young gentleman naturally averse to getting up before daylight, and who earned not more than two or three ten cent pieces daily in the chair shop. But it was not of the fine that he complained. It was a rule of the college, that the fine should carry with it a loss of standing in class. This our student esteemed unjust, and he thought he had good reason to complain since, though, upon the whole, a good scholar, he was always on the point of expulsion from the loss of marks for his morning delinquency. He took an opportunity, at length, to protest against this apparent injustice in a highly audacious and characteristic manner. One of the professors, a distinguished theologian, preached in the college church, a sermon of the severest Calvinistic type, in the course of which he maintained propositions like these: 1. The Elect, and the Elect alone, will be saved. 2. Of the people commonly called Christians, probably not more than one in a hundred will be saved. 3. The heathen have a better chance of salva tion than the inhabitants of Christian countries who neglect their

opportunities. Upon these hints, the young gentleman spake. He drew up a petition to the faculty, couched in the language of profound respect, asking to be excused from further attendance at prayers and sermons, on the grounds so ably sustained in the discourse of the preceding Sunday. If, he said, the doctrine of that sermon was sound, of which he would not presume to entertain a doubt, he was only preparing for himself a future of more exquisite anguish by attending religious services. He begged to be allowed to remind the faculty, that the church in which the sermon was preached, had usually a congregation of six hundred persons, nine of whom were his revered professors and tutors; and as only one in a hundred of ordinary Christians could be saved, three even of the faculty, good men as all of them were, were inevitably damned. Could he, a mere student, and not one of the most exemplary, expect to be saved before his superiors? Far be from him a thought so presumptuous. Shakspeare himself had intimated that the lieutenant cannot expect salvation before his military superior. Nothing remained, therefore, for him but perdition. In this melancholy posture of affairs, it became him to beware of hightening his future torment by listening to the moving eloquence of the pulpit, or availing himself of any of the privileges of religion. But here he was met by the college laws, which compelled attendance at chapel and church; which imposed a pecuniary fine for non-attendance, and entailed a loss of the honors due to his scholarship. Threatened thus with damnation in the next world, bankruptcy and disgrace in this, he implored the merciful consideration of the faculty, and asked to be excused from all further attendance at prayers and at church.

This unique petition was drawn with the utmost care, and the reasoning fully elaborated. Handsomely copied, and folded into the usual form of important public documents, it was sent to the president. The faculty did not take the joke. Before the whole college in chapel assembled, the culprit standing, he was reprimanded for irreverence. It was rumored at the time, that he narrowly escaped expulsion. He had a friend or two in the faculty who, perhaps, could forgive the audacity of the petition, for the sake of its humor.

It must be owned, that the Calvinistic theology in vogue at Waterville, did not commend itself to the mind of this young man.