Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: colony to create this enthusiasm, did not shrink from the storm when thus aroused. He had thrown himself into the front rank, but amidst the tumult maintained the coolness of a consummate leader. Instead of the ungovernable extremes to which ordinary men of his temperament and youth would have been carried, he appeared as the conservator of the peace and the sedate reasoncr. When the impulsive rnob became turbulent, he was found the eloquent dcclaimer against violence to property or life. It was in one of these excitements that lie saved the life of his Professor, Dr. Cooper, when the exasperated crowd had surrounded the college, to make the old loyalist suffer for his principles. This was effected by holding them in abeyance at the door to listen to his sage counsels, until the old gentleman had an opportunity to escape on board of a ship in the harbor. Upon another occasion, when the rage of the people, now forced up to its highest pitch, burst forth ill an attempt to destroy the establishment of llivington, the Tory printer, ho appeared upon the ground, and with the soft persuasive oratory (for which in after life lie was so much distinguished, and, indeed, in which at the New York bar he haduo compeer,) he strove to subdue their passions by eloquent appeals for the liberty of the press. Nor was it alone in the capacity of author, speaker, and counsellor, that Hamilton, even at this age, appeared. Astounding indeed must it seem to us, that a youth of seventeen should combine the rare qualities of excelling in the discussion of abstruse questions of philosophy and of government—the capacity to enforce with a pen of almost unequalled power the great truths of civil and religious liberty, with the yet more effective gift of extemporaneous eloquence, at once ready, fluent, didac...