oth these in his
son, Thomas Marshall devoted himself with enthusiasm and masculine good
sense, aided on the one hand by a very select library consisting of
Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, and on the other by the ever
fresh invitation of the mountainside to healthgiving sports.

Pope was the lad's especial textbook, and we are told that he had
transcribed the whole of the "Essay on Man" by the time he was twelve
and some of the "Moral Essays" as well, besides having "committed to
memory many of the most interesting passages of that distinguished
poet." The result is to be partially discerned many years later in
certain tricks of Marshall's style; but indeed the influence of the
great moralist must have penetrated far deeper. The "Essay on Man"
filled, we may surmise, much the same place in the education of the
first generation of American judges that Herbert Spencer's "Social
Statics" filled in that of the judges of a later day. The "Essay on Man"
pictures the universe as a species of constitutional monarchy governed
"not by partial but by general laws"; in "man's imperial race" this
beneficent sway expresses itself in two principles, "self-love to urge,
and reason to restrain"; instructed by reason, self-love lies at the
basis of all human institutions, the state, government, laws, and has
"found the private in the public good"; so, on the whole, justice is the
inevitable law of life. "Whatever is, is right." It is interesting to
suppose that while Marshall was committing to memory the complacent
lines of the "Essay on Man," his cousin Jefferson may have been deep in
the "Essay on the Origin of Inequality."

At the age of fourteen Marshall was placed for a few months under the
tuition of a clergyman named Campbell, who taught him the rudiments of
Latin and introduced him to Livy, Cicero, and Horace. A little later the
great debate over American rights burst forth and became with Marshall,
as with so many promising lads of the time, the decisive factor in
determining his intellectual bent, and he now began reading Blackstone.
The great British orators, however, whose eloquence had so much to do,
for instance, with shaping Webster's genius, came too late to influence
him greatly.

The part which the War of Independence had in shaping the ideas and the
destiny of John Marshall was most important. As the news of Lexington
and Bunker Hill passed the Potomac, he was among the first to spring to
arms. His services a