children, of about our age,
all boys. A statue in bronze of Horace Mann stands in front of the
State-house in Boston, and the memory of the strenuous reformer well
merits the distinction. He took things seriously and rather grimly, and
was always emphatically in earnest. He was a friend of George Combe, the
phrenologist, after whom his second boy was named; and he was himself
so ardent a believer in the new science that when his younger son,
Benjamin, was submitted to him for criticism at a very early age he
declared, after a strict phrenological examination, that he was not
worth bringing up. But children's heads sometimes undergo strange
transformations as they grow up, and Benjamin lived to refute abundantly
his father's too hasty conclusion in his case. He became eminent as an
entomologist; George followed the example of his father on educational
lines. Horace, who died comparatively early, was an enthusiastic
naturalist, who received the unstinted praise and confidence of the
great Agassiz. My uncle Horace, as I remember him, was a very tall
man, of somewhat meagre build, a chronic sufferer from headaches and
dyspepsia. His hair was sandy, straight, rather long, and very thick; it
hung down uncompromisingly round his head. His face was a long square,
with a mouth and chin large and immitigably firm. His eyes were
reinforced by a glistening pair of gold-bowed spectacles. He always wore
a long-skirted black coat. His aspect was a little intimidating to small
people; but there were lovely qualities in his nature, his character
was touchingly noble and generous, and the world knows the worth of his
intellect. He was anxious, exacting, and dogmatic, and was not always
able to concede that persons who differed from him in opinion could
be morally normal. This was especially noticeable when the topic of
abolition happened to come up for discussion; Horace Mann was ready
to out-Garrison Garrison; he thought Uncle Tom's Cabin a somewhat
milk-and-water tract. He was convinced that Tophet was the future home
of all slave-holders, and really too good for them, and he practically
worshipped the negro. Had he occupied a seat in Congress at that
juncture, it is likely that the civil war might have been started a
decade sooner than it was. My father and mother were much more moderate
in their view of the situation, and my mother used to say that if
slavery was really so evil and demoralizing a thing as the abolitionists
asserted,