he University of Virginia in October,
1839.

From that moment he entered actively and unremittingly on his course of
intellectual training. While a boy he had become familiar, under the
guidance of his father, with the classics of Addison, Johnson, Swift,
Cowper, and Pope, and he now plunged into the domain of history. He had
begun at Kenyon to make flanking forays into the fields of historic
investigation which lay so invitingly on each side of the regular march
of his college course. As he acquired more information and confidence,
these forays became more extensive and profitable. It was then the
transition period from the shallow though graceful pages of Gillies,
Rollin, Russel, and Tytler, and the rabbinical agglomerations of
Shuckford and Prideaux to the modern school of free, profound, and
laborious investigation, which has reared immortal monuments to its
memory in the works of Hallam, Macaulay, Grote, Bancroft, Prescott,
Motley, Niebuhr, Bunsen, Schlosser, Thiers, and their fellows. But of
the last-named none except Niebuhr's History of Rome and Hallam's Middle
Ages were accessible to him in the backwoods of Ohio. Cousin's Course of
the History of Modern Philosophy was just glittering in the horizon, and
Gibbon shone alone as the morning star of the day of historic research,
which he had heralded so long. The French Revolution he had seen only as
presented in Burke's brilliant vituperation and Scott's Tory diatribe. A
republican picture of the great republican revolution, the fountain of
all that is now tolerable in Europe, had not then been presented on any
authentic and comprehensive page.

Not only these, but all historical works of value which the English,
French, and German languages can furnish, with an immense amount of
other intellectual pabulum, were eagerly gathered, consumed with
voracious appetite, and thoroughly digested. Supplied at last with the
required means, he braced himself for a systematic curriculum of law,
and pursued it with marked constancy and success. While at the
university he also took up the German and French languages and mastered
them, and he perfected his scholarship in Latin and Greek. Until his
death he read all these languages with great facility and accuracy, and
he always kept his Greek Testament lying on his table for easy
reference.

After a thorough course at the university, Mr. DAVIS entered upon the
practice of the law in Alexandria, Virginia. He began his profession