office he held until his death in 1802. He was himself a beautiful type of the Everett Family, and, indeed, of the industrious, quiet, benignant, and philomathical citizens of our old honored Norfolk County.

Young Edward began his education at the village school on Meeting-house Hill, in his native town, under the charge of Miss Lucy, daughter of Noah Clapp, Esq. He was then three years old; and his first misfortune in life, he himself has said, was the loss of the "blue paper cover from one corner" of his primer, which then constituted his whole library. He came afterwards, while in Dorchester, under the instruction of the Rev. J. B. Howe and Rev. W. Allen; and here commenced his oratorial career by the recitation, at a public exhibition, of the "Rittle Roan Colt,"

written expressly for him by his affectionate pastor, who, in the expression "little roan," refers to the color of his curling hair.

Soon after the decease of his father, which produced a profound impression of sorrow upon the tender mind of Edward, the family removed to Boston, where, at the age of nine (April, 1803), he commenced attending the public reading and writing

school taught by Masters Little and Tileston, in North Bennet Street. Mr. Ezekiel Little, a graduate of Harvard College in 1784, was a popular instructor in his day, and with the aid of Mr. Caleb Bingham's two excellent class reading-books, the "Columbian Orator" and the "American Preceptor," succeeded in teaching his pupils how to read with animation and propriety, and in inspiring them with a love of declamation. We may easily conceive how modestly, and yet how beautifully, the young orator would pronounce such pieces as

which his clever kinsman, Mr. David Everett, had furnished for the former school-book; or with what winning grace he would repeat such patriotic lines as Dr. Dwight's in the latter excellent work,

The queen of the world, and the child of the skies,"

for, even in early boyhood, he possessed a boy's sweet, silvery eloquence. His other teacher, John Tileston,* was what might be called a "character."

*The book in which Master Tileston kept an account with his scholars between 1760 and 1765 (when he evidently kept a private school), containing several hundred names, was presented to this Society a few years since by Dr. Lewis, the President; and is now in its archives. It illus

He was an old man (having been born in Braintree in 1738), who wore a large horse-hair wig, and who wiped the ink from the pen on his little finger, and then from his finger on the frosty locks just beneath his bushy peruke. He was short and thick; and although his right hand had been burned, and the chords of it drawn together, his penmanship was quite respectable; and he taught the boy—of whom he afterwards became so proud, and who, I think, in 1823, was instrumental in obtaining for him a pension of $600 from the city that plain, even, clear, char

trates perfectly Mr. Everett's statement, that "Master Tileston laid the foundation for a beautiful old-fashioned handwriting, without flourishes, and almost equal to copperplate;" and shows good reason why Mr. Everett in 1859, half a century after he attended his school, at the dedication of a new schoolhouse on the same spot, should say that he "should ever feel grateful to Master Tileston for having deprived him in early life of the distinction which rests upon writing a hand which nobody can read.”

The Society has also among its manuscripts, presented by its aged and early member, the well-known divine, Rev. William Jenks, D.D., a list of Master Tileston's public school from 1778 to 1790, with the date of the entrance of each scholar written out in a beautiful hand a few years since by a venerable and highly respectable citizen of Boston, Edward Cruft, Esq., who entered the school about twenty years before Mr. Everett, and more than ten years before Mr. Everett's birth. There were six hundred and twenty-seven scholars received into the school during these twelve years, only four or five of whom are supposed to be now alive; viz., Timothy Hall, Edward Cruft, William Jenks, and Isaac Harris, of Boston. William Cazneau was living a few months since in San Francisco.

There are quite a number of citizens now living, who were at Master Tileston's school about the same time with Mr. Everett, who universally bear testimony to the remarkable scholarship of Mr. Everett at that early period of his school-days.