the integrity of his democratic principles, had lost his second election,
and returned to the profession of the law.

The last two years of Pierce's preparatory studies were spent at the law
school of Northampton, in Massachusetts, and in the office of Judge
Parker at Amherst. In 1827, being admitted to the bar, he began the
practice of his profession at Hillsborough. It is an interesting fact,
considered in reference to his subsequent splendid career as an advocate,
that he did not, at the outset, give promise of distinguished success.
His first case was a failure, and perhaps a somewhat marked one. But it
is remembered that this defeat, however mortifying at the moment, did but
serve to make him aware of the latent resources of his mind, the full
command of which he was far from having yet attained. To a friend, an
older practitioner, who addressed him with some expression of condolence
and encouragement, Pierce replied,--and it was a kind of self-assertion
which no triumph would have drawn oat,--"I do not need that. I will try
nine hundred and ninety-nine cases, if clients will continue to trust me,
and, if I fail just as I have today, will try the thousandth. I shall
live to argue cases in this court house in a manner that will mortify
neither myself nor my friends." It is in such moments of defeat that
character and ability are mot fairly tested; they would irremediably
crush a youth devoid of real energy, and, being neither more nor less
than his just desert, would be accepted as such. But a failure of this
kind serves an opposite purpose to a mind in which the strongest and
richest qualities lie deep, and, from their very size and mass, cannot at
once be rendered available. It provokes an innate self-confidence,
while, at the same time, it sternly indicates the sedulous cultivation,
the earnest effort, the toil, the agony, which are the conditions of
ultimate success. It is, indeed, one of the best modes of discipline
that experience can administer, and may reasonably be counted a fortunate