scendant of William Bradford, the
Plymouth governor, and thus the two lives which met in Noah Webster were
Pilgrim and Puritan, without, it appears, any quartering from other
sources. All the Websters were a sturdy race. Noah Webster, senior, died
in his ninety-second year; Noah the son in his eighty-fifth; his two
brothers lived for eighty years or more, and his two sisters for
seventy. Out of the scanty memoranda of the family genealogy little more
is to be gleaned, but it is enough for our purpose to know that the man,
whose fortunes we are to follow, inherited the Puritan mind and the New
England constitution.

He had, what every New England family wished to give a boy who had any
quickness of intellect, the education that was at the door. He worked on
his father's farm and went to the village school where rarely a book was
used except a spelling-book, a psalter, a Testament or a Bible. When he
was fourteen years old he had shown that he was of the college kind, and
studying for two years with Dr. Perkins, the village minister, and in
the Hopkins Grammar School at Hartford, he entered Yale College in 1774.
There were about a hundred and fifty students in New Haven at that time,
with a faculty consisting of a Professor of Divinity, who performed the
duties of President, a Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy,
and three tutors. Joel Barlow was a classmate, and so were Oliver
Wolcott, Zephaniah Smith, Ashur Miller, and others who occupied high
judicial positions afterward in the young republic. In Dr. Stiles's
Diary there is an entry June 14, 1778, Webster's senior year. "The
students disputed forensically this day a twofold question; whether the
destruction of the Alexandrian Library and the ignorance of the Middle
Ages, caused by the inundation of the Goths and Vandals, were events
unfortunate to literature. They disputed inimitably well, particularly
Barlow, Swift, and Webster."

There is something peculiarly felicitous in this grave record. It was a
rotund kind of learning which was cherished by Dr. Stiles and similar
guardians of the old traditions of scholarship, and in the absence of
much commerce with their intellectual peers beyond the limits of the
colonies, each college made believe very hard that its students were
scholars, and its scholastic life the counterpart of historic
universities. But it is easy to believe that the fate of the Alexandrian
Library and the performances of the notorious Got