ious indulgence in
irregular hours.

Union was, at this epoch, and during the active life of the doctor,
the third university of the United States, coming, in the general
estimation and the number of its graduates, immediately after Yale,
Harvard being then, as always, the first; and it owed its character
and peculiar reputation to the strong and singular personality of its
first president. I have, in the course of my life, become more or less
acquainted with many able men, and Dr. Nott was the most remarkable of
all the teachers I have ever known, considering the limitation of his
position and profession,--that of a Presbyterian clergyman in a time
when sectarian differences ran high, and his sect had no lead in
public opinion. He had attained his position by the force of his
character assisted by his extraordinary tact and eloquence, but
unaided by patronage, and this at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, a time when institutions were forming and nothing was settled
in the character of society. The manual of public speakers which we
used to draw on for the speeches in class recitations included, as one
of the most brilliant examples, the doctor's oration on the death
of Alexander Hamilton, killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, one of the
earliest and the most prominent of the demagogues of America. I have
not read the oration for fifty years; but, as I remember it, it
was, in the fashion of the day, one of the most eloquent of all our
readings.

As I was a favorite of the doctor in the last year of my course and
for years after, and as no one has ever in my estimation done him
justice, it is to me a debt of gratitude, as well as a matter of
justice, to repair as best I may this neglect. No one but a pupil
could ever have fairly estimated his force of character, and no pupil
whose intercourse with him was not carried into the post-graduate
years could measure the ability with which he advised, especially in
political matters, with his old pupils. In the days of his activity,
no institution in the country furnished so large an element to the
practical statesmanship of the United States as did Union. Seward
was one of his favorite pupils, and it is well known that, up to the
period of the American Civil War, he never took a step in politics
without the advice of the doctor. Having had a struggle with poverty
in his own early life, Dr. Nott sympathized heartily with the poorer
students, and a practical education was