E-text prepared by Julia Miller, Diane Monico, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 32089-h.htm or 32089-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32089/pg32089-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32089/32089-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/American Libraries. See http://www.archive.org/details/memoirofjaredspa00mayeiala MEMOIR OF JARED SPARKS, LL.D. by BRANTZ MAYER. President of the Maryland Historical Society: [Illustration: Jared Sparks _Anno Ætatis XL._] [Illustration] Prepared at the Request of the Society, and Read Before Its Annual Meeting, on Thursday Evening, February 7, 1867. Printed for the Maryland Historical Society, by John Murphy. Baltimore, 1867. MEMOIR. IT has been a sad but not entirely unpleasant duty to prepare, at the request of the Maryland Historical Society, a brief memoir of one of our earliest and most distinguished Honorary Members, the late JARED SPARKS, LL.D. The duty, though sad, is not without a pleasant recompense, for the eulogium which a long-continued friendship and intercourse demand can be bestowed with cordial truth. Mr. Sparks was what we call, in America, a self-made man. Although his life is a fair illustration of what an industrious person of talent and common sense may compass by decision of character and a high aim, my object in these observations is not to draw from his biography what has been aptly called "ostentatious precepts and impertinent lessons." By a self-made man I do not mean to class Mr. Sparks with that large and influential body of citizens whose portraits adorn the illustrated newspapers, and whose memoirs disclose the opinion that the making of a great deal of money is the making of a very exemplary man. When I speak of Mr. Sparks as a self-made man I use the phrase in a sense of intellectual progress and success, founded on self-relying discipline,--of mental culture and mental fruit, bringing him up to honorable fame from low obscurity,--making him a lasting power in our nation, nay, throughout the world, in our best society, in our literature, in our institutions of learning; and, finally, bestowing on him the just pecuniary rewards always due, yet seldom obtained in America, by intellectual pursuits alone.