the Revolutionary War broke out both went
into the service, Thomas Marshall being colonel of one of the Virginia
regiments. His son, John Marshall, who was not twenty years old when the
conflict began, became a lieutenant under his father. The mother of John
Marshall was named Mary Kieth, and his grandmother Elizabeth Markham,
and the latter was born in England.

Marshall's father had a good mind, not much education; but he was a
great reader, and especially loved poetry, and he taught his son to
commit poetry to memory, and to model his mind on the clear diction and
heroic strain of poets like Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope. In
these books of poetry the great chief-justice found the springs to
freshen his own good character. To the last day of his life he loved
literature, and was especially fond of novels, and of books written by
females. He held the view that the United States must be a literary
nation in the sense of having great and noble authors to leaven its
people and teach them high thoughts. His schools were chiefly down in
the Chesapeake Bay, in the county of his birth, and his teachers were
poor Presbyterian clergymen from Scotland, who at that period were the
teachers of nearly all the Middle States, from New York southward. He
knew some Latin, but not very much. One of his teachers was his own
father, who, with a large family, took delight in training this boy.

OUR JUDGE ON DRILL.

In 1775 the country hunters and boors on the Blue Ridge Mountain went to
their mustering place, and, the senior officer being absent, this young
Marshall, with a gun on his shoulder, began to show them how to use it.
Like them, he wore a blue hunting shirt and trousers of some stuff
fringed with white, and in his round hat was a buck-tail for a cockade.
He was about six feet high, lean and straight, with a dark skin, black
hair, a pretty low forehead, and rich, dark small eyes, the whole making
a face dutiful, pleasing, and modest. After the drill was over he stood
up and told those strange, wild mountaineers, who had no newspapers and
knew little of the world, what the war was about. He described to them
the battle of Lexington. They listened to him for an hour, as if he had
been some young preacher.

Thus was our great chief-justice introduced to public life. He had come
to serve, and found that he must instruct. When he marched with the
regiment of these mountaineers, who carried tomahawks and
scalping-knives,