weathered the Girard National Bank through the panic years of 1838-40,
and whose honour, impugned after his death, in 1857, was defended
many years later by his son in "The Book of the Dead," reflective of
Tennyson's "In Memoriam," and marked by a triteness of phrase
which was always Boker's chief limitation, both as a poet and as a
dramatist.

He was brought up in an atmosphere of ease and refinement, receiving
his preparatory education in private schools, and entering Princeton
in 1840. On the testimony of Leland, who, being related to Boker, was
thrown with him in their early years, and who avows that he always
showed a love for the theatre, we learn that the young college student
bore that same distinction of manner which had marked him as a child,
and was to cling to him as a diplomat. Together as boys, these
two would read their "Percy's Reliques," "Don Quixote," Byron and
Scott--and while they were both in Princeton, Boker's room possessed
the only carpet in the dormitory, and his walls boasted shelves of the
handsomest books in college.

"As a mere schoolboy," wrote Leland, "Boker's knowledge of
poetry was remarkable. I can remember that he even at nine
years of age manifested that wonderful gift that caused him
many years after to be characterized by some great actor--I
think it was Forrest--as the best reader in America.... While
at college ... Shakespeare and Byron were his favourites. He
used to quiz me sometimes for my predilections for Wordsworth
and Coleridge. We both loved Shelly passionately."

In fact, Leland claims that Boker was given to ridicule the "Lakers;"
had he studied them instead, he would have added to his own poetry a
naturalness of expression which it lacked.

He was quite the poet of Princeton in his day, quite the gentleman
Bohemian. "He was," writes Leland, "quite familiar, in a refined and
gentlemanly way, with all the dissipations of Philadelphia and New
York." His easy circumstances made it possible for him to balance his
ascetic taste for scholarship with riding horse-back. To which almost
perfect attainment, he added the skilled ability to box, fence and
dance. He graduated from Princeton in 1842, and the description of him
left to us by Leland reveals a young man of nineteen, six feet tall,
whose sculptured bust, made at this time, was not as much like him "as
the ordinary busts of Lord Byron." In later years he was said to bear
striking rese