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: CHAPTER II PREPARATION FOR THE LAW When Webster became a student at Dartmouth the institution was—as it still was twenty-one years later when he summoned all his powers to its defense before the highest tribunal of the land—a little college. Its origin is to be traced to a plan of the missionary, John Sergeant, for the establishment of an Indian school at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. By reason of the premature death of Sergeant the project upon which he was bent was delayed, but it was taken up by Dr. Eleazer Wheelock, of Lebanon, Connecticut, and broadened to comprehend the founding of an institution of higher learning for both Indians and whites. Funds were collected in England and America and a site, offered by Governor Thomas Wentworth and other citizens of New Hampshire, was accepted, consisting of the township of Hanover, on the eastern bank of the Connecticut. In 1770 the college, bearing the name of an English patron, the Earl of Dartmouth, and endowed with upward of fifty thousand acres of laud in New Hampshire and Vermont, opened its doors, under the management of President Wheelock and a self-perpetuating board of twelve trustees. A class of four was graduated in 1771. By 1797 there were upward of two hundred students in the college, and the number of graduates from year to year was surpassed at only one other institution in the country. The quality of instruction was excellent,although the range was of necessity restricted. As a freshman young Webster merely went on with the reading of the Eneid and of the Greek New Testament. In the sophomore year there was more of the same sort of thing, with excursions into arithmetic and algebra. Of new subjects to be studied there were practically none. And, recalling the dislike which Webster cherished for mathematics, an...