manners, she took delight in the duties as well as the pleasures of domestic life, while a cheerful resignation to the will of Providence during many years of sickness and suffering, bore witness to the strength of her religious faith. So happily did these various dispositions harmonize together, that the subject of this memoir often declared, that he had never, in a single instance, heard either of his parents use towards the other an angry or unkind word.' They were both singularly exempt from ambition or aspiring wishes, and content along the cool sequestered vale of life' to keep "the noiseless tenor of their way.' CHAPTER II. 1745-1764. HIS BIRTH AND EDUCATION. JOHN JAY, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was born in the city of New York, on the 12th day of December, 1745. He was the son of Peter and Mary Jay, and the eighth of a family of ten children. The sketch of his ancestors which we have given in the preceding chapter, presents a pleasing instance of unassuming but heroic virtue, flowing with its original purity from one generation to another, and in all its course meeting with no obstruction, and sullied with no stain. And we shall see that he whose career we are now to trace, did no discredit to the examples which adorned and illustrated the line from which he sprung. In honor and virtue he was their equal, while his ability and public service, by attracting attention to his lineage, have made their merits known to the world. While still an infant, he was removed with the family to the country place which Mr. Jay had provided at Rye. The influence of natural scenery upon character has been often remarked. We shall not dwell upon it here. We may observe, however, that he whose boyhood has been familiar with natural objects, who has passed that formative period of existence amid the repose and expansive influences of the country, has just cause to congratulate himself upon so happy a circumstance. His after-life will bear witness to the benefits derived from it. In all his conduct, in vigor of intellect and promptitude of action, he will generally assert a superiority over him who was bred up amid the conventionalities and artificialities of the town. He will have a higher relish and keener appreciation of life. He will be less governed, in his conduct and opinions, by the semblance of things. He will be likely to go through the world like a substance and a force, not like a formula of one. Our American public life is full of examples which illustrate the correctness of these observations. We deem it fortunate, therefore, that the childhood of John Jay was passed in the country, in communion with nature-that he was a natural product, and not the growth of a hot-house. He was taught the rudiments of knowledge by his mother, who snatched sufficient time from the pressure of domestic concerns, to instruct her children. He made good progress under her tuition, and was prepared, when eight years old, to enter a grammar school. As a child, he was remarked for his serious and studious disposition. Johnny is of a very grave disposition,' observes his father, and takes to learning exceedingly well. He will soon be fit to go to a grammar school.' He was at this time in his seventh year. In the following year, the hopes and favorable anticipations of the father seem to have gathered strength. In a letter to his uncle, Mr. Peloquin of Bristol, he modestly says, 'I cannot forbear taking the freedom of hinting to you that my Johnny gives me a very pleasing prospect. He seems to be endowed with a very good capacity, is very reserved, and quite of his brother James's disposition for books.' It is interesting to observe how the characteristics of the boy manifest themselves in the life of the man. Contemporary with this reserved and studious lad, whose conduct gave his parents such a pleasing prospect, there was growing up in another country, under very different auspices, and subjected to a very different training, one of those great original natures that appear, at long intervals, upon the earth to rouse mankind from the torpor of despotism or luxury, to shake and thereby purify the moral elements of society. Gabriel Honore Mirabeau was quite another man from John Jay; a great and irregular genius, the broad, burly mutineer of the world, one of the most extraordinary men of his extraordinary times. The father of young Mirabeau, the tough old Marquis,' like the father of young Jay, did not fail to discern the qualities of this elder lad of his, nor to give utterance to the impressions which they made upon him. 'This creature,' he says, 'promises to be a very pretty subject. Talent in plenty and cleverness, but more faults still inherent in the substance of him.' 'Only just come into life, and the extravasation of the thing already visible! A spirit cross-grained, fantastic, iracund, incompatible, tending towards evil before knowing it, or being capable of it.' 'A high heart under the jacket of a boy; it has a strange instinct of pride, this creature ; noble withal; the embryo of a shaggy-headed bully and kill-cow that would swallow all the world, and is not twelve years old yet.' 'A type, profoundly inconceivable, of baseness; sheer dull grossness, and the quality of your dirty, tough-crusted caterpillar, that will never uncrust itself or fly.' 'An intelligence, a memory, a capacity that strike you, that astonish, that frighten you.' 'A nothing bedizzened with crotchets. May fling dust in the eyes of silly women, but will never be the fourth part of a man, if by good luck he be anything.' 'One whom you may call ill-born, this elder lad of mine; who bodes, at least hitherto, as if he could become nothing but a madman: almost invincibly maniac, with all the vile qualities of the maternal stock over and above. As he has a great many masters, and all, from the confessor to the comrade, are so many reporters to me, I see the nature of the beast, and doubt we shall ever do any good with him.'1 Observe in what a different strain he writes from Peter Jay. The one is describing, inconsistently and angrily to be sure, an eager, turbulent, impetuous, magnetic nature, full of life, impatient of restraint, pressing on to its objects, exultant, and defiant in its strength. The other, a calm, reflective being, intent on duty, anxious for the right, never irregularly great, but always equal to whatever station is assigned him, and attracting the regards of men by the integrity of his life, the justness of his views, and the elevation of his aims, rather than by the exhibition of rare and strange powers. Jay was animated by virtuous, Mirabeau by aspiring sentiments. The one or the other character will challenge our admiration or engage our affections, just in proportion as our mental and moral qualities are assimilated to theirs. In his eighth year, Mr. Jay sent Johnny' to the grammar school at New Rochelle, a village but a few miles distant from Rye. The inhabitants were mostly of French extraction, and spoke their native tongue. He had thus an opportunity, at the most receptive period of life for that kind of acquisition, to become familiar with a language, which was to be of almost indispensable importance to him, in his subsequent diplomatic career. The first separation of a lad from the paternal homestead the first breaking up of his earliest associations - is one of the sharpest trials to which childhood is subjected. Whoever has read, (and who has not?) Lamb's Essay upon Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years ago, will remember how pathetically he describes his sufferings and loneliness whilst an inmate of that celebrated school. As he retraces the impressions, and revives the recollections of his boyhood, he touchingly observes: O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams, would my native town, (far in the West,) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and, in the anguish of my heart, exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire !' If John Jay has left us no such picture of his feelings while under the roof of the Rev. Mr. Stoope, pastor of the French church at New Rochelle and principal of the grammar school there, we know enough of the treatment to which he was subjected to be at no loss to conjecture that he experienced them. The Rev. Mr. Stoope was a Swiss gentleman of peculiar, but not uncommon character. Curious and all-intent upon his studies, particularly the mathematics, careless of money, utterly improvident, he seems to have been as heedless of the practical affairs of life as one of Aristophanes' philosophers. The parsonage went to decay; Sublime in air, Sublime in thought, I carry my mind with me, To the pure atmosphere in which I float: Lower me to the earth, and my mind's subtle powers Seized by contagious dulness, lose their spirit; The vegetating vigor of philosophy, And leaves it a mere husk. THE CLOUDS, Scene II. |