the "Academy" in Hampton, Virginia, under his venerated master, John
B. Cary, Esq.,--the master who declares himself proud to say,
"I taught him"--the invaluable friend of all his after years.

In 1847 he graduated from William and Mary College with the degree
of A.B.

From the "Pennsylvania," upon which man-of-war he was secretary to
his uncle, Captain Samuel Barron, he was transferred to the
"Cyane," and in 1852 made a cruise to the West Indies.

In 1856 he was elected Commonwealth's attorney to the "game-cock
town of Virginia," historic and picturesque old Hampton, which was
the centre of a charming and cultivated society and which had
already claimed him as her "bard." For as Henry Ellen he had
contributed to various southern publications, his poems in "The
Southern Literary Messenger" attracting much gratifying attention.

In 1857 Lippincott brought out "Leoni di Monota and Other Poems."
The volume was cordially noticed by the southern critics of the time,
not only for its central poem, but also for several of its minor ones,
notably, "The Charge at Balaklava," which G.P.R. James--as have
others since--declared unsurpassed by Tennyson's "Charge of the
Light Brigade."

Upon the 13th of May, 1857, he stood poet at the 250th anniversary
of the English settlement at Jamestown.

As poet, and as the youthful colleague of Henry A. Wise and John R.
Thompson, he stood at the base of Crawford's statue of Washington,