Pope was the lad's especial textbook, and we are told that he had transcribed the whole of the Essay on Man by the time he was twelve and some of the Moral Essays as well, besides having "committed to memory many of the most interesting passages of that distinguished poet." The result is to be partially discerned many years later in certain tricks of Marshall's style; but indeed the influence of the great moralist must have penetrated far deeper. The Essay on Man filled, we may surmise, much the same place in the education of the first generation of American judges that Herbert Spencer's Social Statics filled in that of the judges of a later day. The Essay on Man pictures the universe as a species of constitutional monarchy governed "not by partial but by general laws"; in "man's imperial race" this beneficent sway expresses itself in two principles, "self-love to urge, and reason to restrain"; instructed by reason, self-love lies at the basis of all human institutions, the state, government, laws, and has "found the private in the public good"; so, on the whole, justice is the inevitable law of life. "Whatever is, is right." It is interesting to suppose that while Marshall was committing to memory the complacent lines of the Essay on Man, his cousin Jefferson may have been deep in the Essay on the Origin of Inequality. At the age of fourteen Marshall was placed for a few months under the tuition of a clergyman named Campbell, who taught him the rudiments of Latin and introduced him to Livy, Cicero, and Horace. A little later the great debate over American rights burst forth and became with Marshall, as with so many promising lads of the time, the decisive factor in determining his intellectual bent, and he now began reading Blackstone. The great British orators, however, whose eloquence had so much to do, for instance, with shaping Webster's genius, came too late to influence him greatly.