Page:Letters of Life.djvu/78

66 decidedly a religious character, a ripe scholar, and of great amenity of manners and disposition. The belles-lettres studies were admirably taught by him, and he gave critical attention to the correct expression of written thought. He read to us portions of the best standard authors, in his own elegant elocution, and encouraged us freely to criticize both style and sentiment.

There seemed an arrogance in such a band of tyros sitting in judgment on Addison, and Steele, and Johnson, and Lord Bacon, and Edmund Burke. But his tact and patience were wonderful with our crude opinions, often uttered for the sake of saying something, and not unmarked by captiousness. Into the idioms and refinements of our own language he carefully led us. The "Exercises of Lindley Murray" he especially rendered delightful in daily lessons, throwing us back continually upon definition and derivation, until the roots of words, and their minute shades of meaning, became beautiful as thought-pictures. So much did he inspire us with his own favorite tastes, that parsing the most difficult passages of the poets, remarkable either for elision or amplification, was coveted as a sport. The culture of memory was also a prominent object with him, for, being a natural metaphysician, he scanned the intellect as a map, and wrought in each department. He occasionally read slowly to us pages from rare or antique works, historical, descriptive, or