s took on a more martial
character, and the poetical _feuilleton_ gave place to a military
chronicle.

Jejune enough do these hints seem to make the life in which Webster
grew up: but if it was poverty-stricken as compared with the abundant
resources of our own day,--if the Hartford of 1765 is to be contrasted
with that of 1881, to the manifest disadvantage of the former,--one
would wish to remember that in the very sterility of that life there was
a certain iron which entered into the constitution of the people who
lived it. If there were not the leisure and culture of the present day,
neither were there the mental indolence and dissipation. Ames's Almanac
was a joyless sort of light literature, but at least it did not reduce
intellectual recreation to a mere frivolous indulgence of the mental
faculties. A fine picture could be drawn of Webster on the one side,
extracting what juice he could from the chippy leaves of the almanac and
"Courant," and of a youth of this year, entering a public library with
his card, and having the range of a hundred thousand volumes; but the
real comparison is to be made between the results in character and
production. We are painfully familiar with the lists of books which
constitute the reading of the average boy of to-day, and know perfectly
well that they are very often narcotic and stimulant. The reading which
was had with such difficulty in the middle of the eighteenth century may
sometimes have acted as a sedative, but it was by reason of quality and
scarcity more generally brave food; in the mind of the reader there was
an immense respect for literature which induced a genuine hunger for
books, and the individuality of one who had intellectual tastes was not
impaired, as so often happens now, but fortified and enriched.

The farm, the social round, the school, the college, the out-door
sports, the in-door books and papers, were all parts of the circumstance
which affected the life of the youth, but no picture of the time would
be complete which omitted the influence upon him of the church. He would
grow up with the impression that the meeting-house was the principal
building in town, the minister the principal person, and Sunday the
principal day. A curious illustration of the strong hold which the
religious observance of Sunday had upon the colonists then is in the
construction of what were known as Sabbath-Day Houses, which I think
were peculiar to Connecticut. At any rate, ther