Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/22

10 devoted to study. What he had learned was little enough. In Peter Deacon's schoolhouse he had received nothing but the first elementary instruction. The year he spent behind the counter of Denny's store could not have added much to his stock of knowledge. In Peter Tinsley's office he had cultivated a neat and regular handwriting, of which a folio volume of Chancellor Wythe's decisions, once in the possession of Jefferson, now in the library of the Supreme Court of the United States, gives ample testimony. Under Chancellor Wythe's guidance he had read Harris's Homer, Tooke's Diversions of Purley, Bishop Lowth's Grammar, Plutarch's Lives, some elementary law-books, and a few works on history. Further, the Chancellor's conversation had undoubtedly been in a high degree instructive and morally elevating. But all these things did not constitute a well-ordered education. His only more or less systematic training he received during the short year he spent as a law student in the office of Attorney-General Brooke, and that can scarcely have gone far beyond the elementary principles of law and the ordinary routine of practice in court. On the whole, he had depended upon the occasional gathering of miscellaneous information. He could thus, at best, have acquired only a slender equipment for the tasks before him. This, however, would have been of comparatively slight importance had he, in learning what little he knew, cultivated thorough methods of inquiry, and the habit of reasoning out