on October 10, 1857, a little girl,
Pauline Cazenove Durant, who lived less than two months. On
June 21, 1862, we find the Boston Evening Courier saying of the
prominent lawyer: "What the future has in store for Mr. Durant
can of course be only predicted, but his past is secure, and if
he never rises higher, he can rest in the consciousness that no
man ever rose more rapidly at the Suffolk Bar than he has." And
within a year he had put it all behind him,--a sinful and unworthy
life,--and had set out to be a new man. That there was sin and
unworthiness in the old life we, who look into our own hearts,
need not doubt; but how much of sin, how much of unworthiness,
happily we need not determine. Mr. Durant was probably his own
severest critic.

Miss Conant's characterization of Mr. Durant, in his own words
describing James Otis, is particularly illuminating in its revelation
of his temperament. In February, 1860, he said of James Otis,
in an address delivered in the Boston Mercantile Library Lecture
course:

"One cannot study his writings and history and escape the conviction
that there were two natures in this great man. There was the
trained lawyer, man of action, prompt and brave in every emergency.
But there was in him another nature higher than this. In all times
men have entertained angels unawares, ministering spirits, whose
missions are not wholly known to themselves even, men living beyond
and in advance of their age.

"We call them prophets, inspired seers,--in the widest and largest
sense poets, for they come to create new empires of thought, new
realms in the history of the mind.... But more ample traditions
remain of his powers as an orator and of the astonishing effects
of his eloquence. He was eminently an orator of action in its
finest sense; his contemporaries speak of him as a flame of fire
and repeat the phrase as if it were the only one which could express
the intense passion of his eloquence, the electric flames which
his genius kindled, the magical power which swayed the great
assemblies with the irresistible sweep of the whirlwind."

Mr. Durant's attitude toward education is also elucidated for us
by Miss Conant in her apt quotations from his address on the
American Scholar, delivered at Bowdoin College, August, 1862:

"The cause of God's poor is the sublime gospel of American freedom.
It is our faith that national greatness has its only enduring
foundation in the intelligence and