utting his name on little ivory seals, and engraving
ciphers--"J.P."--so beautiful in their character, and so graceful, that
one I have now before me, an impression taken by him in wax, with a
vermilion bed,--for in all such matters he was very particular,--were
enough to establish any man's reputation as a seal engraver. It bears
about the same relationship to what are _called_ ciphers, that Benvenuto
Cellini's flower-cups bore to the clumsy goblets of his day.

He was never a great reader, not being able to read more than fifty
pages of law and miscellany in a day, though he managed, for once, while
a tutor in Colonel Alston's family at Charleston, South Carolina,
beginning by daylight and continuing as long as he could see, in
midsummer, to get through with one hundred pages of Blackstone; but the
"grind" was too much for him,--he never tried it again. He read Gibbon,
and Chateaubriand's "Genius of Christianity," and St. Pierre, and Jeremy
Bentham's "Theory of Rewards and Punishments," but never to my knowledge
a novel, a romance, or a magazine article, except an occasional review;
but Joanna Baillie,--that female Shakespeare of a later age,--and
Beattie, and Campbell, and the British poets, and dramatic writers, were
always at hand, when he had nothing better to do, with no seals to cut,
no ciphers, no razor-strops, no stoves, and no clients. Over that field
of enchantment and illusion he wandered with lifted wings, month after
month, and year after year.

At this time he was in his thirtieth year, and I in my twenty-second. No
two persons were ever more unlike; and yet we grew to be intimate
friends after a while; and at the time of his death our friendship had
lasted more than fifty years, with a single interruption of a
twelvemonth or so while I was abroad, which was put an end to by our
letters of reconciliation crossing each other almost on the same day.

With a young family on his hands, precarious health and a feeble
constitution, as we then believed, which drove him to Saratoga every two
or three years, and no property, what had he to look forward to, unless
he could manage to go through a course of starvation at half-price, or
diet with the chameleons?--though great things were expected of him by
those who knew him best, and the late Mr. Justice Story could not bear
to think of his abandoning the profession, so long as there was a decent
chance of living through such a course of preparation.

After all t