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HON. S. S. PRENTISS.

"For talents mourn untimely lost,
When best employed, and wanted most,
Mourn genius, taste and lore profound,
And wit that loved to play not wound;
And all the reasoning powers divine,
To penetrate, resolve, combine;
And feelings keen, and fancy's glow;
They sleep with him who sleeps below.
And if thou mourn'st they could not save
From error, him who owns this grave,
Be every harsher thought suppressed,
And sacred be the last long rest."

SCOTT,

This eminent lawyer, this brilliant orator, this adopted son of the South, was born in the State of Maine, city of Portland, situated on Casco bay, which he called "the fairest dimple on the cheek of Ocean."

We pass by his early life, merely noticing the first reading that formed his taste.

This was from Scott, Cooper, Irving, Byron, and most of all from his favorite Shakspeare. The Bible, too, was thoroughly read, and admired by him. Its sublime passages and figures he often quoted in his speeches.

He read with wonderful rapidity, so much so that one of his classmates once observed, "Prentiss reads two pages at the same time, one with his right eye, and the other with his left!"

This is the way he devoured the works we have mentioned, Milton, Bacon, and all the old masters. His classical training, and his familiarity with the Bible, and the great models of English speech, imparted a richness, strength and felicity to his diction, as well as dignity to his sentiment.

He had gathered rich stories from the wild field of fic

tion and romance; from old classical mythology, and from the whole region of chivalry. Here he got those gems that glittered in his speeches; those thoughts that flew from him in every possible variety and beauty, like birds from a South American forest-those "figures that bubbled up and poured themselves along, like springs in a gushing fountain."

He was fond, in his leisure hours, of hunting and fishing, though he appeared physically incapacitated for such sport, for his right leg was feeble, and it never became so but what he walked with it partly coiled round a stout

cane.

The difficulties of his journey South-he was then seventeen, had just graduated at Bowdoin college, he always thought that he graduated too young, and regretted, like Randolph, that he had not stored his mind with more of the riches of books and study-have something of thrilling interest in them as they are narrated by his brother.

Mention is made of this trip by a lawyer of celebrity in Cincinnati, who relates the circumstance of a youth's coming into his office, one morning, and inquiring whether it was a good place for a young man to get into business, and who so impressed him with his worth, and the tones of his voice, and manner, that he never could forget him. And years afterwards when Prentiss became the pride of the South, he felt an equal pride in relating this circumstance, and the incidents of a short acquaintance with him.

Something of trifling importance was the cause of his not remaining at Cincinnati. Hence the brightest page of Mississippi's, and not Ohio's, history is adorned with the name of a Prentiss.

In his passage down the Mississippi, the steamboat was impeded by some cause, and compelled to lay by. He, with a party of others, took their guns and went ashore

to hunt. Having wandered away in the woods from the rest, who returned to the boat just as she got out of difficulty and was ready to start on, he came very near being left to finish his journey South the best way he could; for when he came back to the bank of the river the steamer had gone, but some one on board caught sight of him, and the captain waived the usual habit of the boat, directed it ashore, and took him aboard.

He stopped at Natches, where he not only found himself in a strange place, but penniless. He fortunately found, in a stranger here, a friend, who offered him money which was gladly accepted, and afterwards paid with grateful thanks. He taught school, some ten miles out in the country from Natches, in the family of Mrs. Judge Shields, for some three hundred dollars per year. He afterwards taught in an Academy, then commenced the study of law, in the above-named city.

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There is something similar in the history of the two Prentisses-George D. Prentice, the fine journalist, poet and wit of Louisville, Kentucky, and Sargeant S. Prentiss of Mississippi. Both were sons of New England, both early sought their fortunes in the South, both became its adopted sons, and both have dazzled it with the brilliancy of their intellects.

From the first appearance of S. S. Prentiss at the Mississippi bar, in the front ranks of which stood such men as Holt, Boyd, Quitman, Wilkinson, Winchester, Foote, Henderson and others, he was regarded as a sort of mythical personage. No one knew anything of the "limping boy" and his school-teaching in Mississippi; but from obscurity he had emerged into the public gaze so suddenly, and with such brilliant effect, that everybody was envious to know his history. They seized and magnified all the strange stories in circulation about him. Some thought

him a disinherited boy-a young Ivanhoe that had wandered away from his home in the North to far off Mississippi.

But when, like an unknown Byron, he appeared among them, the Scotts, and Shelleys, and Wordsworths of law and oratory, if they did not retire in dismay, gazed upon him with wonder and admiration. They considered him genius itself that had vaulted, at one bound, into its full pride of place.

One of his cotemporaries at the bar, in after years, writes of him: "His early reading and education had been extensive and deep. Probably no man of his age in the State was so well read in the ancient and modern classics, in the current literature of the day, and—what may seem stranger-in the sacred Scriptures. His speeches drew some of their grandest images, strongest exprèssions, and aptest illustrations from the inspired writings.

In writing of his life South he says in a letter to his sister Anna, "I owe all my success in this country to the fact of my having so kind a mother, and two such sweet and affectionate sisters as you and Abby are. It has been my only motive to exertion; without it, I should long since have thrown myself away; and often now I feel perfectly reckless about life and fortune, and look with contempt upon them both."

This sounds like Byron, whom he resembled, not only in lameness, but in his genius and in many other respects.

“There was much about him to remind you of Byron: the cast of his head, the classic features, the fiery and restive nature, the moral and personal daring, the imaginative and poetical temperament, the scorn and deep passion, the deformity of which I have spoken, the satiric wit, the craving for excitement, and the air of melancholy he sometimes wore, his early neglect, and the imagined slights put upon his unfriended youth, the collisions, mental and physical, which he had with others, his brilliant and sudden reputation, and the romantic

interest which invested him, make up a list of correspondences, still further increased, alas! by his untimely death."

"But," he continues in his letter, "I am solaced only by the recollection that there are true hearts that beat for me with real affection. This comes over me as the music of David did over the dark spirit of Saul."

Mr. Prentiss had scarcely passed a decade from his majority ere he was the idol of Mississippi. While absent from the State his name was brought before the people for Congress; the State then voting by general ticket, and electing two members. "He was elected, but the sitting members, Gholson and Claiborne, refused to give up their seats on the ground that they were elected at the special election ordered by Governor Lynch, for two years and not for the session only."

If he had astonished the Mississippi bar with the sudden burst of his eloquence, like "the Disinherited Knight," he entered the lists in the Halls of Congress with the great champions of debate, and astonished both Houses by his noble defence of Mississippi, and by the power and charm of his oratory.

When congress met, he and Word, his colleague, had not yet arrived. Wise, Webster, Clay and others of their party, held a caucus to see what should be done with the "Mississippi contested election," and they resolved that the two members, Word and Prentiss, should be taken into pupilage and put under a course of training, and that some able member should aid them with arguments and prepare them for their parts.

At this suggestion W. C. Dawson, late senator from Georgia, who knew Prentiss, arose and said:

66 'Oh, gentlemen, you need to be at no such pains; you have no babes to nurse. One of them is a host in himself, who can take care of Mississippi, and rather help us, to

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