how to darn stockings; let me show you.” He being an old bachelor, and she the mother of ten children, the remark seemed the very climax of impudence; but he took the needle from her, and taught her, as she always maintained, more about darning stockings than she had ever known in her life before. This combination of unexpected knowledge and amazing frankness in its proclamation shows what a critic like Horace Mann, himself not wanting in self-assertion, might have found to suggest antagonism in “forty Fullers.”
Of a family thus gifted and thus opinionated, Timothy Fuller, Margaret Fuller’s father, was the oldest, the most successful, and the most assured. He was born July 11, 1778, and received his father’s name; graduated at Harvard College, with the second honors of his class, in 1801; was at different times a member of various branches of the state government of Massachusetts; and was a representative in Congress from 1817 to 1825. He was in politics a Jeffersonian Democrat, was chairman of the House committee on naval affairs, and was a warm supporter of John Quincy Adams for the presidency. Many references to him may be found in Mr. Adams’s voluminous diary. Inheriting anti-slavery principles on both sides, he warmly opposed the Missouri Compromise, and his speeches on this and other subjects found their way into print. He worked hard in his profession, kept up his classical reading, and was making preparations to write a history of the United
