Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/351

 cost him, he left his gold watch in pawn with the innkeeper.… During the tour in Kerry, ''he swam twice around the Devil's Punch-Bowl. The health which he began with was wonderful;'' a spoonful of rhubarb, he cheerfully boasted, cured all the ills to which his flesh was heir; although the maladies which his careless but laborious mode of life too early brought upon him, ere long required sterner remedies. He would gladly have been thinner, but he was too much of a man to be ashamed of a misfortune which he did his utmost to correct; for, in whatever pastime he was engaged, he always contrived to get out of it the greatest practicable amount of bodily exercise:"—Trevelyan's Early History of Charles James Fox.

Marshall, says George van Santvoord, is the American Mansfield, as Washington—greater than the noblest Roman of them all—is the American Cincinnatus. "My father," he would say, "was a far abler man than any of his sons. To him I owe the solid foundation of all my own success in life." He developed, even in his younger years, a remarkable aptitude for study. At an age when most children are engaged in those simple elementary tasks which make up the routine of school-boy life, he had already acquired we are told, a taste for reading poetry and history, and was fond of amusing his leisure hours by a study of the old English authors. At the age of twelve he had transcribed the whole of Pope's "Essay on Man," and some of his moral essays, and had committed to memory many of their most interesting passages. He was born at Germantown, Virginia. Here the son remained until his fourteenth year, laying the foundation of that vigorous health which attended him through life, and deriving from his father all the training in letters which he received up to that period. He never went to college. He began to study law at eighteen; served six years in the Revolution, becoming Lieutenant; admitted to the Bar at twenty-five; had the largest practice in Virginia at twenty-seven; in the House of Burgesses at thirty-two; member of the