Give him
only a little knowledge of his subject, and, certainly among all the
young men of my acquaintance and standing at college, there was not
one whom I had not rather meet, than this man. I never answered a
question from him, or advanced an opinion to him, without thinking
more than once. With an iron memory, he seemed to have your whole past
conversation at command, and if you said a thing now which ill
agreed with something said months before, he was sure to have you on
the hip. In fact, I always felt, when with him, that I was with no
common man. I had a positive respect for his powers of mind, and
felt often that if half the pains had been spent upon his education
which are thrown away, yearly, in our colleges, he would have been a
man of great weight in society. Like most self-taught men, he
over-estimated the value of an education; and this, I often told
him, though I profited by it myself; for he always treated me with
respect, and often unnecessarily gave way to me, from an over-estimate
of my knowledge. For the intellectual capacities of all the rest of
the crew, captain and all, he had the most sovereign contempt.
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