at students may read this work with profit even today. But the chief
importance of these volumes lay, after all, in the additional power
which the author himself derived from the labor of their preparation. In
so extensive an undertaking Marshall received valuable training for his
later task of laying the foundations of Constitutional Law in America.
One of his chief assets on the bench, as we have already seen, was
his complete confidence in his own knowledge of the intentions of the
Constitution--a confidence which was grounded in the consciousness that
he had written the history of the Constitution's framing.

Most of Marshall's correspondence, which is not voluminous, deals with
politics or legal matters. But there are letters in which the personal
side of the Chief Justice is revealed. He gives his friend Story a
touching account of the loss of two of his children. He praises old
friends and laments his inability to make new ones. He commends Jane
Austen, whose novels he has just finished reading. "Her flights," he
remarks, "are not lofty, she does not soar on eagle's wings, but she
is pleasing, interesting, equable, and yet amusing." He laments that he
"can no longer debate and yet cannot apply his mind to anything else."
One recalls Darwin's similar lament that his scientific work had
deprived him of all liking for poetry.

The following letter, which Marshall wrote the year before his death to
his grandson, a lad of fourteen or fifteen, is interesting for its
views on a variety of subjects and is especially pleasing for its
characteristic freedom from condescension:

"I had yesterday the pleasure of receiving your letter of the 29th
of November, and am quite pleased with the course of study you are
pursuing. Proficiency in Greek and Latin is indispensable to an
accomplished scholar, and may be of great real advantage in our progress
through human life. Cicero deserves to be studied still more for his
talents than for the improvement in language to be derived from reading
him. He was unquestionably, with the single exception of Demosthenes,
the greatest orator among the ancients. He was too a profound
Philosopher. His 'de ofiiciis' is among the most valuable treatises I
have ever seen in the Latin language.

"History is among the most essential departments of knowledge; and, to
an American, the histories of England and of the United States are
most instructive. Every man ought to be intimately acquainted with