edly made acquaintance with Rasselas and the Spectator. In all his after life of mar velous fecundity with his pen, his style was Addisonian, and his rhetoric rich with John sonian purity of language devoid ofturgidity or pomposity of expression. But although under aspirations he did "contemn the grov elling condition of a clerk, " he so conscien tiously mastered its details and duties as to be left, not yet fifteen years old, in sole con trol of the business when Mr. Cruger, his employer, voyaged to the American colonies for a short commercial visit. But Hamilton's faculties so attracted the attention of mater nal relatives who were possessed of means, that they raised pecuniary supplies for him, and sent him to the American colonies fur nished with letters from his employer and the rector of the island parish. He landed at Boston; and but that his recommenda tions were addressed to New Yorkers he might have become an ally of Otis, Quincy and Adams instead of becoming a patriot comrade with Morris and Livingston. Arrived in New York, he determined to enter a college, and after attending a pre paratory school at Elizabethtown, he tried Princeton College, where he proposed to the astonished faculty to be accepted with the understanding that, if he could by extra reading thereafter jump a class, such proce dure would be allowed. The college rules forbade such a revolutionary course; and so Princeton lost the opportunity of placing on its catalogue the name of Hamilton be side the names of the Dayton, Ogden, and Frelinghuysen of that era. But King's Col lege, now Columbia, was more complaisant; and with the above understanding he there matriculated and found himself a collegemate with that "Dear Ned" to whom he had addressed his discontent and strivings. With some of the blood of his maternal grandfather, the physician, in his veins, he not only underwent the collegiate course, but attended its medical lectures; and with a possible eye to following his grandsire s
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profession. But the echo of the first few words of the Aeneid of Virgil lingered in his ears, " Arma virumque cano "; and when the Sons of Liberty invited the clever col legian of seventeen to join them, he thought not of becoming a surgeon to care for the wounded in the approaching conflict, but of fighting among the wounded. He was an orator without knowing that he had the gift of persuasion or the capacity to become eloquent. But he addressed a meeting of patriots in the Fields, the site of New York's City Hall Park, with such effect that the as semblage marveled at the youth and ability of the young West Indian of the neighbor ing college. He wrote anonymous articles in the patriot newspaper, and issued an anonymous pamphlet endorsing the cries of rebellion that were borne westward from Boston. In time it became known that the young patriot orator of the Fields was this American Junius. War was sounding at the doors of the college. It had to close. While was whispered leges silent, he an swered the cry of inter arma; and raised an artillery company while exchanging the col lege curriculum for lessons from an European military emigre in engineering and artillery practice. When a British fleet appeared off New York harbor and began operations that in the end were summed up in the bon-mot, "Lord Howe he came in; and lord! how he went out, " Hamilton, not yet of age, be gan that military career which every Ameri can generation thoroughly knows. A career that made him spectator of the Battle of Long Island; a participant in the affairs on Haarlem Heights and at White Plains in a brief campaign that won him the acquain tance and admiration of Washington, whom he accompanied on the march to Trenton, where he became aide-de-camp and private secretary to the Commander-in-Chief; and with a brief intermission continued in that service until at Yorktown he heard an American band triumphantly play the Yankee Doodle that an English band had
