Page:The Southern Literary Messenger - Minor.djvu/274

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The Southern.

In 1845, he purchased from Dr. William Gilmore Simms his Southern and Western Magazine, of Charleston, S. C., and merged it in the Messenger. In 1845, he was a delegate to the Memphis Convention, over which Mr. Calhoun presided, and was one of its vice-presidents, and introduced the Maury Warehousing System. In the summer of 1847, he disposed of his periodical, and removed to Staunton, Va., to take charge of "The Virginia Female Institute," to which he had been urgently called, without any solicitation. But the trustees had made such flattering offers to induce his acceptance that they had not the means of fulfilling them. So he voluntarily resigned, returned to Richmond, and resumed the practice of law, which literature and education had destroyed. To help the law, he founded and fathered "The Home School for Young Ladies," but did not teach in it.

While engaged in practice, he wrote for some law journals and edited a new and complete edition of the Reports of Chancellor George Wythe, with a memoir of him, and a new edition of Hening and Munford's Reports of the decisions of the Supreme Court of Virginia.

In Richmond, Mr. Minor was called to various positions in which he endeavored to be useful. He was warden and register of St. James church and its delegate to the Diocesan Council; the