o the office at seven, read a little geometry
and algebra, reviewing the slender mathematics which I had
studied in college, and then spent two hours in reading Greek.
I read through Thucydides, Homer and Xenophon's Hellenica
and some other Greek books in that year. Sundays I went to
church twice, but shut myself up in a room at home the rest
of the day and read a great quantity of English literature,
including Milton, Spencer, Chaucer, George Herbert, South's
Sermons and other English classics, reading over again Butler's
Analogy and Jouffroy. It has been said that if a man wish
to acquire a pure English style he should give his days and
nights to Addison. I say that if a law student wish to acquire
a vigorous and manly English style, the fit vehicle for conveying
weighty thoughts to courts or juries or popular assemblages,
let him give his days and nights to Robert South.

I spent two years at the Law School after graduating from
the College. I cannot state too strongly my great debt to
it, and to Franklin Dexter, Simon Greenleaf, Joel Parker,
and Theophilus Parsons. I have no remorse for wasted hours
during those two years. The time in a Law School is never
likely to be wasted if the youth have in him any spark of
generous ambition. He sees the practical relation of what
he is learning with what he has to do in life. The Dane Law
School was then, and I suppose it is even more true of it
now, a most admirable place for learning the science of law
and preparing for its practice. The youth breathed a legal
atmosphere from morning till night all the year round. He
had the advantage of most admirable instruction, and the resources
of a complete library. He listened to the lectures, he studied
the text-books, he was drilled in the recitations, he had
practice in the moot courts and in the law clubs. He discussed
points of law in the boarding-house and on his walks with
his companions. He came to know thoroughly the great men
who were his instructors, and to understand their mental processes,
and the methods by which they had gained their success. The
title of old Nathan Dane to a high place on the roll of his
country's benefactors, and to the gratitude of the profession of
the law, and of all lovers of jurisprudence throughout the
country cannot be disputed.

CHAPTER VIII
1846 TO 1850. FOUNDATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
DANIEL WEBSTER.

The foundation of the Republican party, and my personal memor