proselyte any of his students. Yet the very atmosphere of the school made sectarian bigotry and narrowness impossible."
But the boy was destined for college, and was now sent to a classical school, where Stoddard, the story writer, was among his fellow-pupils, and where, though the methods in classical teaching were imperfect, "the want in grammatical drill was more than made up by the love of manliness and the dislike of meanness which was in those days our very atmosphere."
Outside the school his imagination had been stimulated by desultory reading and by pictures of travel, and he had stumbled upon the novels of Scott, to which above all was due the birth of his interest in historical studies. The public meetings of the time, especially those of the antislavery party, took also a deep hold upon his mind.
He had dreamed of entering one of the great New England universities; but the zealous young churchman into whose hands he was put for his final training persuaded his father to send him instead to the young and struggling Episcopal college at the neighboring town of Geneva. There he matriculated in the fall of 1849. With all his loyalty to his father's church and to his father's wish, the college could not content him. Dependent on the wealthy patrons whose sons it sought to educate, its discipline was lax and its means too feeble for the work it undertook. "Only about half a dozen of our number studied at all; the rest, by translations, promptings, and evasions of various sorts, escaped without labor."
A year of this was all that he could stand, and when, at the opening of another, his protest was still unheeded, he took French leave of his reluctant alma mater and went into hiding at the home of an old instructor until his father at last gave consent to his transfer to Yale College. There he was admitted in January, 1851, to what has since become "the famous class of '53." But, even among such classmates as Billings and Davies and Gibson and Lewis and MacVeagh and Robinson and Shiras and Smalley and Stedman, he soon won for himself a high place—not so much by his work in the classroom, though that was good, as by the breadth of his information and of his sympathies, and by his facility with pen and voice. He became an editor of the college magazine. The Lit, and before his graduation won the first Clark, the Yale Literary, and the De Forest prizes, the last for an essay on The History of Modern Diplomacy. Nor were physical and social claims neglected. He belonged to the earliest Yale crew, and he became a member of Psi Upsilon and of the mystic Skull and Bones, as well as of the more literary Linonia. His roommate and bosom friend was his classmate Davies, to-day Bishop of Michigan. Of his college work, perhaps that which left the
