school of philosophy, as he considered it, they talked over the new doctrines, attacked, defended, resisted, and were at last more or less conquered by them. Here his own mind, hitherto but a reflecting mirror of the ideas of others, began to move and march on. He now began to think clearly for himself on all subjects.
"The European mind," as he expresses it, "began to transfuse itself into the American mind, and I began to apply to the different circumstances of the two theatres of action the results at which I arrived.
"It was in 1837 that I learned Italian, in company with young Rawson,[1] whose talents had then begun to show themselves strikingly. Several years afterward, when editing the 'Mercurio' in Santiago de Chili, I familiarized myself with Portuguese, which is very easy. In Paris, still later, I shut myself up fifteen days with a German grammar and dictionary, and translated six pages to the satisfaction of an intelligent man who gave me lessons, that supreme effort leaving me an incomplete scholar, although I thought I had caught the structure of that rebellious idiom.
"I taught French to many persons for the sake of spreading good reading among them; and to sundry of my friends I taught it without giving them lessons. To put them in the path which I had trodden, I said, 'You must not fail to study—I am coming.' And when I saw their self-love fairly piqued, I gave them a few lessons upon the way to study for themselves.
"In all these efforts I always had in full activity the organ of instruction, and which was more cultivated in me than any other; educated by the living speech of the presbyter Oro, and the curate Albarracin, and always seeking the society of well-informed men, then and after-
- ↑ Late Secretary of State in the Republic.
