An Unpublished Letter of Chancellor James Kent. History and his profound reflections & ad mirable eloquence struck most deeply on my youthful mind. I extracted the most admired parts and made several volumes of M. S. S. I was admitted to the bar of the Supr. Court in January 1785, at the age of 2 1, and then married without one cent of property; for my education exhausted all my kind father's resources and left me in debt $400.00, which took me two or three years to discharge. Why did I marry? I answer that. At the farmers house where I boarded, one of his daughters, a little modest, lovely girl of 14 generally caught my attention & in sensibly stole upon my affections, & I before I thought of love or knew what it was, I was most violently affected. I was 21. and my wife 1 6 when we married, & that charming lovely girl has been the idol & solace of my life, & is now with me in my office, uncon scious that I am writing this concerning her. We have both had uniform health & the most perfect & unalloyed domestic happi ness, & are both as well now & in as good spirits as when we married. We have three adult children. My son lives with me and is 26, & a lawyer, & of excellent sense, & discretion, & of the purest morals. My eldest daughter is well married, & lives the next door to me, with the intimacy of our family, my youngest daughter is now of age, she lives with me, & is my little idol. I went to housekeeping at Poughkeepsie, 1786, in a small, snug cottage, & there I lived in charming simplicity for eight years. My practice was just about sufficient to re deem me from debt, & to maintain my wife & establishment decently, and supply me with books about as fast as I could read them. I had neglected & almost entirely forgotten my scanty knowledge of the Greek & Roman classics, & an accident turned my attention to them very suddenly. At the June Circuit in 1786, I saw Ed. Living ston (now the codifier for Louisiana) & he had a pocket Horace & read some passages
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to me at some office & pointed out their beauties, assuming that I well understood Horace. I said nothing, but was stung with shame & mortification, for I had forgotten even my Greek letters. I purchased im mediately Horace and Virgil, a dictionary & grammer, and a Greek Lexicon & gram mer and the testament, & formed my reso lution promptly and decidedly to recover the lost languages. I studied in my little cottage mornings and devoted an hour to greek and another to latin daily, I soon increased it to two for each tonge in the 24 hours, my acquaint ance with the languages increased rapidly. After I had read Horace and Virgil I ven tured upon Livy for the first time in my life, & after I had completed the Greek Testa ment I took up the Iliad, & I can hardly describe at this day (!) with which I pro gressively read and studied in the original Livy & the Iliad. It gave me inspiration, I purchased a French Dictionary & grammer & began French & gave an hour to this lan guage daily. I appropriated the business part of the day to law, & read Co. Litt, & made copious notes. I devoted evening to English literature in company with my wife. From 1788 to 1798 I steadily divided the day into five portions, & alotted them to Greek, Latin, law and business, Frencli & ••Englis-h. I mastered the best of the Greek, Latin and French classics, & as well as the best English & law books at hand & read Mackiavel & all collateral branches of Eng lish history, such as Libeletines H. 2nd Ba cons H. 7th. Lord Clarendon on the great Rebellion, &c. I even sent to England as early as 1790 for Warbertons divine legation Lusiad. My library which started from nothing grew with my growth, & it has now attained to upwards of 3000 volumes, & it is pretty well selected, for there is scarcely a work, authority or document referred to in the 3 volumes of my commentaries but what 1 Words omitted in original.
