a good scholar but careless. Under him I repeated the
grammatical forms and rules in Latin and Greek, glibly,
term after term, without really understanding their
value. His great mistake, which seems to me a not
infrequent one, was taking it for granted that repeating
rules and forms means understanding them and their
application. But a catastrophe came. I had been promoted
beyond my deserts from a lower into an upper Latin class,
and at a public examination the Rev. Samuel Joseph
May, who was present, asked me a question, to which I
made an answer revealing utter ignorance of one of the
simplest principles of Latin grammar. He was discon-
certed at the result, I still more so, and our preceptor most
of all. That evening my father very solemnly asked me
about it. I was mortified beyond expression, did not
sleep at all that night, and of my own accord, began
reviewing my Andrews and Stoddard thoroughly and
vigorously. But this did not save the preceptor. A
successor was called, a man who afterward became an
eminent Presbyterian divine and professor in a Southern
university, James W. Hoyt, one of the best and truest
of men, and his manly, moral influence over his scholars
was remarkable. Many of them have reached positions of
usefulness, and I think they will agree that his influence
upon their lives was most happy. The only drawback
was that he was still very young, not yet through his
senior year in Union College, and his methods in classical
teaching were imperfect. He loved his classics and taught
his better students to love them, but he was neither
thorough in grammar, nor sure in translation, and this I