But we are anticipating. At the time of our first acquaintance, he
certainly entertained very different views upon the subjects which have
made him so conspicuous within the last twenty-five years.

Instead of being an Abolitionist, or a Garrisonian, and insisting upon
immediate, universal, and unconditional emancipation, he was a
colonizationist, rather tolerant of the evil, as it existed in the
South, and very patient under the wrongs of our black brethren; and so
was I.

Instead of being a teetotaler, he was hardly what the temperance men of
our day would call a temperance man; for he had wine upon his table when
he gave dinners, and never shrank from the interchange of courtesies,
nor refused a pledge,--though I did, even then. Yet more, as brandy had
been prescribed for Mrs. Pierpont by the family physician, Dr. Randall,
her husband used to take his brandy and water with her sometimes, just
before dinner, by way of a "whet."

Again: he had been brought up, like St. Paul, at the very feet of
Gamaliel. He was born Orthodox,--he lived Orthodox,--he sat for years
under the preaching of Dr. Lyman Beecher, whom he looked upon as a
"giant among pygmies,"--and well he might, as a metaphysician and as a
controversialist, if not as a theologian,--and was, I have lately been
told, a member of Dr. Spring's Orthodox church at Newburyport, before
his removal to Boston. But once there, in that overcharged atmosphere,
he took a pew in the Brattle Street Unitarian church,--without being
then a Unitarian, or dreaming of the great change that was to follow
within two or three years,--and was a regular attendant under the
preaching of Mr. Everett up to the last. On his removal to Baltimore, he
swung round again toward Orthodoxy,--that Orthodoxy which has been so