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[7] for advanced standing, and was finally admitted as a Junior, and went to reside there from Commencement, August, 1805. Meantime, I continued to study with my father at home. In 1803 I was put to learn French with Mr. Francis Sales, with whom I made very good progress, though his pronunciation was bad, as he came from the South of France, and both he and I had to correct it later. I also learnt a little Spanish with him,—but very little; though he knew it tolerably well, having lived some time in Spain with an uncle, who, like himself, was a refugee in the time of the Revolution.

About the same time, Mr. Ezekiel Webster, an elder brother of Daniel, a graduate of Dartmouth College, kept a school in Short Street, near my father's house, which was in Essex Street; and my father, thinking Mr. Webster might know more Greek than he did, sent me to him at private hours, to read Homer's Iliad. It was a mistake. I very soon found out that Mr. Webster knew less Greek than my father, and could teach me nothing. But I did not tell of this. I read about half the Iliad with him, much amused by the original, and more with Pope, of which I read the whole.

At Hanover, from 1805 to 1807, I was in Dartmouth College. One main reason for my going there was that my half-sister, Miss Curtis, was married to an extremely respectable lawyer of that place, Mr. William Woodward, and I lived in her family. I had a good room, and led a very pleasant life, with good and respectable people, all more or less connected with the college; but I learnt very little. The instructors generally were not as good teachers as my father had been, and I knew it; so I took no great interest in study. I remember liking to read Horace, and I enjoyed calculating the great eclipse of 1806, and making a projection of it, which turned out nearly right. This, however, with a tolerably good knowledge of the higher algebra, was all I ever acquired in mathematics, and it was soon forgotten.

I was idle in college, and learnt little; but I led a happy life, and ran into no wildness or excesses. Indeed, in that village life, there was small opportunity for such things, and those with whom I lived and associated, both in college and in the society of the place, were excellent people.

Of my classmates, Joseph Bell afterwards became an eminent lawyer; Hunt, the father of the artist and the architect, was a member of Congress; Newcombe distinguished himself in the navy. But the two whom I knew the most were Holbrook—a gentle, careful, but not very successful scholar, who died at the South, where he was a schoolmaster—and Thayer, Sylvanus Thayer, who was the first

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