never a time in his
whole career when he had not some youth upon his hands to whose
education he was devoted. His system of training, with many excellent
points, was radically defective. Its defects are sufficiently
indicated when we say that It was pagan, not Christian. Plato,
Socrates, Cato, and Cicero might have pronounced it good and
sufficient: St. John, St. Augustine, and all the Christian host would
have lamented it as fatally defective. But if Burr educated his child
as though she were a Roman girl, her mother was with her during the
first eleven years of her life, to supply, in some degree, what was
wanting in the instructions of her father.

Burr was a stoic. He cultivated hardness. Fortitude and fidelity were
his favorite virtues. The seal which he used in his correspondence
with his intimate friends, and with them only, was descriptive of his
character and prophetic of his destiny. It was a Rock, solitary in the
midst of a tempestuous ocean, and bore the inscription, "_Nee flatu
nee fluctu_"--neither by wind nor by wave. It was his principle to
steel himself against the inevitable evils of life. If we were asked
to select from his writings the sentence which contains most of his
characteristic way of thinking, it would be one which he wrote in his
twenty-fourth year to his future wife: "That mind is truly great which
can bear with equanimity the trifling and unavoidable vexations of
life, and be affected only by those which determine our substantial
bliss." He utterly despised all complaining, even of the greatest
calamities. He even experienced a kind of proud pleasure in enduring
the fierce obloquy of his later years. One day, near the close of his
life, when a friend had told him of some new scandal respecting his
moral conduct, he said: "That's right, my child, tell me what they
say. I like to know what the public say of me,--the _great_ public!"
Such words he would utter without the slightest bitterness, speaking
of the _great_ public as a humorous old grandfather might of a
wayward, foolish, good little child.

So, at the dawn of a career which promised nothing but glory and
prosperity, surrounded by all the appliances of ease and pleasure, he
was solicitous to teach his child to do and to endure. He would have
her accustomed to sleep alone, and to go about the house in the dark.
Her breakfast was of bread and milk. He was resolute in exacting the
less agreeable tasks, such as arithmetic. He insisted