or politicians, stands in his way....

"Well, he accepted the post and wrote to his wife next day, who was
preparing for a summer's residence in a small house they had taken on
the sea-coast, that he could not come because he was already
established in Frankfort as minister. The result, he said, was three
days of tears on her part. He had previously been leading the life of
a plain country squire with a moderate income, had never held any
position in the government or in diplomacy, and had hardly ever been
to court."

L

THE YOUTH OF GEORGE TICKNOR

George Ticknor was born in 1791. His father, he says, fitted him for
college. He never went to a regular school. President Wheelock,
Professor Woodward, and others connected with Dartmouth College, who
were in the habit of making his father's house their home in the long
winter vacations, took much notice of him; and the professor, after
examining him in Cicero _Orations_ and the Greek Testament, gave him a
certificate of admission before he was ten years old. "Of course," he
adds, "I knew very little, and the whole thing was a form, perhaps a
farce. There was no thought of my going to college then, and I did not
go till I was fourteen, but I was twice examined at the college (where
I went with my father and mother every summer) for advanced standing,
and was finally admitted as a junior, and went to reside there from
Commencement, August, 1805." He learned very little at college. "The
instructors generally were not as good teachers as my father had been,
and I knew it." He consequently took no great interest in study,
although he liked reading Horace, and had mathematics enough to enjoy
calculating the great eclipse of 1806, and making a projection of it
which turned out nearly right. To supply the deficiency in classical
acquirements with which he left college, he was placed under Dr. John
Gardiner, of Trinity Church, who was reputed a good scholar, having
been bred in the mother country under Dr. Parr.

"I prepared at home what he prescribed, and the rest of my time
occupied myself according to my tastes. I read with him parts of Livy,
the _Annals_ of Tacitus, the whole of Juvenal and Persius, the
_Satires_ of Horace, and portions of other Latin classics which I do
not remember. I wrote Latin prose and verse. In Greek I read some
books of the _Odyssey_, I don't remember how many; the _Alcestis_; and
two or three other plays of Euripides; the _Prometheus Vinc