he was refused a load of apples, which he had gone to buy on Saturday afternoon, because the farmer, on consulting the sun, decided that he could not measure out the fruit before the strict Sabbath began.

The minister again represented to the young New Englander the highest expression of human attainment. He was righteous and he was learned. Learning he had in a severe and lofty form, and though there was little in his outward dress to mark him as a priest of God, he was isolated from the community by his authority and profession, so that he answered rather to one's conception of a prophet. Before him were brought offenders against Sabbath decorum, and the minister's study was to the boy the most awful room into which he could enter. This association of learning with piety served to heighten still further the respect with which learning was regarded, and to separate the young student almost by a special laying on of hands. The minister also usually had his glebe, and held a common interest with the farmers of the neighborhood,—a humanizing relation which had much to do in preserving the real respect in which he was held. The positive influence of religion upon life, by being identified with the highest intellectualism and the most eminent persons, had thus both its strength and weakness. There was wanting the large and comprehensive spirit of an historic church; there was the peril of a too abstract regard for religion; but on the other hand there was a very strong stimulus to individualism. No one with any force of character could grow up under these influences without being vigorously affected by them.

CHAPTER II.

THE GRAMMATICAL INSTITUTE.

"In the year 1782, while the American army was lying on the bank of the Hudson, I kept a classical school in Goshen, Orange County, State of New York. I there compiled two small elementary books for teaching the English language. The country was then impoverished, intercourse with Great Britain was interrupted, school-books were scarce and hardly attainable, and there was no certain prospect of peace."

These words have doubtless a familiar sound to the reader. They form the phrases which Webster never wearied of repeating, and whenever he had occasion to refer to the beginning of his literary career he fell naturally into this paragraph. It became a formula for the expression of a fact which was embedded in his mind as a stone marking a point of departure. There is a consciousness in it of the beginning of a great enterprise, and certainly, when one considers the immense stream which has flowed from this little rill, he may seriously stand and gaze at the young school-master and his two small elementary books. The modesty of the statement agrees with the size of the books, but not with the expansiveness of the composite title. The work projected by Webster was "A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, comprising an Easy, Concise, and Systematic Method of Education, designed for the Use of English Schools in America." The "Institute" was to be in three parts, which were, in brief, a speller, a grammar, and a reader. The formal and dignified title of the work was the tribute which Webster paid to old-fashioned scholarship; and it is curious to see the evolution by which it finally became the well-known "Elementary." One or two ideas were working their way out in Webster's mind. In the first place he did not like the book generally in use, "Dilworth's New Guide to the English Tongue;" then he saw with more or less clearness that, in the separation from England that was fast taking place, the people in America must necessarily have their own school-books, and his mind ran forward even to a belief in a distinct and separate literature and a considerable difference in language. Yet at this time I am not sure that he appreciated the pregnant truth, so familiar to us now, of a vital connection between popular education and popular sovereignty. He began to see it, and was influenced by it; but his work was mightier than he then knew, for he had not been educated in a free republic.

How simple and slight a change in methods of text-books marks the introduction of Webster's spelling-book, from which millions of Americans have learned to spell the names on a ballot! Lay Dilworth and a first Webster side by side: the likeness and the difference of the two are apparent. It is clear that Dilworth served as a model, and that Webster's book started simply as an improvement upon the English original. Even in externals there is a similarity. The early editions of Webster had a dim, hacked-out engraving on wood of Noah Webster, Jr., Esq., to correspond with the scarcely more refined portrait of Tho. Dilworth which prefaces the "New Guide." Both books have long lists of words, proceeding from the simplest combination to words of five syllables, and even in Dilworth to proper names of six syllables, containing such retired words as Abelbethmaacah; but in Webster these lists proceed upon a regular gradation of pronunciation, while in Dilworth they follow such confusing and arbitrary order as is indicated by the heading, "Words of five, six, etc., letters, viz.: two vowels and the rest consonants; the latter vowel serving only to lengthen the sound of the former, except where it is otherwise marked," which is nearly as luminous as a direction in knitting. Each offers illustrated fables as reading lessons, and shorter sentences are provided for first lessons in reading. In Dilworth these are, without exception, taken from the Psalms, or made up to order to look like apocryphal psalms; in Webster there is a suggestive divergence, for while, as in Dilworth, the first sentence is, "No man may put off the law of God," it takes a very few pages for the child to reach the very practical passage, "As for those boys and girls that mind not their books, and love not church and school, but play with such as tell tales, tell lies, curse, swear, and steal, they will come to some bad end,