Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/221

 a sea-captain—a picturesque but precarious profession—so that, owing to parental impecuniosity, the boy had been obliged to leave college and become pill-roller to his neighbor, the doctor. In this capacity he does not appear by any means to have set the Thames on fire. By his master’s influence he was later worked into the Medical Corps as a surgeon’s mate. There he remained for five years, till, apparently despairing of promotion, he obeyed an inherited impulse and shipped as surgeon on a privateer for the rest of the war. Notwithstanding this jejune beginning, he attained, in later life, considerable fame as physician, essayist, and statesman. He was a member of sundry learned societies, served in the Massachusetts Senate and Council, and received from Harvard an honorary M.B. in 1791 and an honorary M.D. in 1809. As a family man he had the enviable record of sixteen children, winding up with twins. His greatest failing was an incurable itch for public speaking; he gloried in the dubious distinction of having delivered more orations, on a larger assortment of topics, than any of his contemporaries. In 1820, however, he reached his final peroration.