James Barrett

Memorial Address on the Life and Character of the Hon. Jacob Collamer James Barrett

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1868. Excerpt: ... requires that this outline sketch should bo rounded into the lineaments of actual life. Within the limits which I have prescribed to myself, I shall proceed, and speak of him with reference to periods, positions, and relations that await ed him, and gave distinctive progression in the making up of the substance of his visible, demonstrated, practical life; and, in so doing, I shall make use of facts as I know them from others, as well as from my own observation, and shall interblend them with such views, speculative and otherwise, as I entertain of him; necessarily giving, at the best, but a hurried and fragmentary delineation of one who would grace, as well as he deserves, a full and carefully written biographical memoir by some able and adequately trained hand. Of course, in many things, I shall but repeat what others have better said. Of Judge Collainer's childhood and life before entering college I have learned nothing to distinguish him from the children of other poor parents, living in the early growing villages of the State, and getting a scanty subsistence by daily toil. In college he encountered the customary embarrassments of poverty, in a meagre fitting, and in the inability to supply himself with all the needed auxiliaries to the most successful prosecution of a liberal education during his college course. As a student, in the earlier portion of his course, his boyish propensity for fun and roguish playfulness operated adversely to his assiduity and success in study, not, indeed, indicating a tendency to vicious indulgences and habits, so much as a fondness for annoying his college mates whom he could successfully tease for the amusement of himself and others. In the laSt two years of his studentship he devoted himself with more assiduity to t...