art by her sadness and tears.
She cultivated the memory of my father in my heart and affections, even
in my earliest childhood, by reading to me passages from the poets, and
obliging me to learn by heart and repeat such as were best adapted to
her own circumstances and feelings. Among others, the whole leave-taking
of Hector and Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one of
her favorite lessons, which she made me learn and frequently repeat. Her
imagination, probably, found consolation in the repetition of lines
which brought to mind and seemed to typify her own great bereavement.

'And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be,--
A widow I, a helpless orphan he?'

These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's address and
circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, which seemed
relieved by the tears my repetition of them drew from her."

Pope's Homer is not Homer, perhaps; but how many noble natures have felt
its elation, how many bruised spirits the solace of its bracing, if
monotonous melody! To us there is something inexpressibly tender in this
instinct of the widowed mother to find consolation in the idealization
of her grief by mingling it with those sorrows which genius has turned
into the perennial delight of mankind. This was a kind of sentiment that
was healthy for her boy, refining without unnerving, and associating his
father's memory with a noble company unassailable by time. It was
through this lady, whose image looks down on us out of the past, so full
of sweetness and refinement, that Mr. Quincy became of kin with Mr.
Wendell Phillips, so justly eminent as a speaker. There is something
nearer than cater-cousinship in a certain impetuous audacity of temper
common to them both.

When six years old, Mr. Quincy was sent to Phillips Academy at Andover,
where he remained till he entered college. His form-fellow here was a
man of thirty, who had been a surgeon in the Continental Army, and whose
character and adventures might almost seem borrowed from a romance of
Smollett. Under Principal Pearson, the lad, though a near relative of
the founder of the school, seems to have endured all that severity of
the old _a posteriori_ method of teaching which still smarted in
Tusser's memory when he sang,

"From Paul's I went, to Eton sent,
To learn straightways the Latin phrase,
Where fifty-three stripes given to me
At once I had."

The young victim of the wisdom o