rvels, and if he was an exquisite in dress all his life, it certainly
was not due to after-thought. Meanwhile, he lodged with the family of
Hercules Mulligan, and wrote doggerel for their amusement in the
evening. Troup relates that Hamilton presented him with a manuscript of
fugitive poetry, written at this period. Mercifully, Troup lost it.
Hamilton has been peculiarly fortunate in this respect. He lies more
serenely in his grave than most great men.

When he was not studying, or joking, or rhyming, during those two short
years of college life, he read: Cudworth's "Intellectual System,"
Hobbes's "Dialogues," Bacon's "Essays," Plutarch's "Morals," Cicero's
"De Officiis," Montaigne's "Essays," Rousseau's "Emile," Demosthenes's
"Orations," Aristotle's "Politics," Ralt's "Dictionary of Trade," and
the "Lex Mercatoria."

He accomplished his mental feats by the--to him--simple practice of
keeping one thing before his mind at a time, then relegating it
uncompromisingly to the background; where, however, it was safe in the
folds of his memory. What would have sprained most minds merely
stimulated his, and never affected his spirits nor his health, highly as
nature had strung his nerves. He was putting five years college work
into two, but the effect was an expansion and strengthening of the
forces in his brain; they never weakened for an instant.

XIV

In the spring of 1774 Hamilton visited Boston during a short holiday.
His glimpse of this city had been so brief that it had impressed his
mind but as a thing of roofs and trees, a fantastic woodland
amphitheatre, in whose depths men of large and solemn mien added daily
to the sum of human discomfort. He returned to see the important city of
Boston, but with no overwhelming desire to come in closer contact with
its forbidding inhabitants. He quickly forgot the city in what those
stern sour men had to tell him. For to them he owed that revelation of
the tragic justice of the American cause which enabled him to begin with
the pen his part in the Revolution, forcing the crisis, taking rank as a
political philosopher when but a youth of seventeen; instead of bolting
from his books to the battlefield at the first welcome call to arms. Up
to this time he had adhered to his resolution to let nothing impede the
progress of his education, to live strictly in the hour until the time
came to leave the college for the world. Therefore, although he had
heard the question of Colonies v