By ancestry on both sides, and by connections with the Russells and other distinguished families, Lowell was a good type of the New England gentleman. He was born on the 22d of February, 1819, at Elmwood, not far from Brattle Street, Cambridge. This three-storied colonial mansion of wood, was built in 1767 by Thomas Oliver, the last royal Lieutenant-Governor, before the Revolution.[1] Like other houses in "Tory Row," it was abandoned by its owners. Soon afterwards it came into possession of Elbridge Gerry, Governor of Massachusetts, and fifth Vice-President of the United States, whose memory and name are kept alive by the term "_gerrymander_." It next became the property of Dr. Lowell about a year before the birth of his youngest child, and it was the home of the poet until his death. [Footnote 1: Thomas Oliver was graduated from Harvard College in the class of 1758. He was a gentleman of fortune, and lived first in Roxbury. He bought the property on Elmwood Avenue in 1766. When he accepted the royal commission of Lieutenant-Governor, he became President of the Council appointed by the King. On Sept. 2, 1774, about four thousand Middlesex freeholders assembled at Cambridge and compelled the mandamus councillors to resign. The President of the Council urged the propriety of delay, but the Committee would not spare him. He was forced to sign an agreement, "as a man of honor and a Christian, that he would never hereafter, upon any terms whatsoever, accept a seat at said Board on the present novel and oppressive form of government." He immediately quitted Cambridge; and when the British troops evacuated Boston he accompanied them. By an odd coincidence he went to reside at Bristol, England, where he died at the age of eighty-two years, in 1815, shortly before the Lowells, who were of Bristol origin, took possession of his former home. In Underwood's sketch of Lowell, Thomas Oliver is confused with Chief Justice Peter Oliver, a man of a very different type of character.] Lowell's early education was obtained mainly at a school kept nearly opposite Elmwood by a retired publisher, an Englishman, Mr. William Wells. He also studied in the classical school of Mr. Danial G. Ingraham in Boston. He was graduated from Harvard College in the class of 1838. He is reported as declaring that he read almost everything except the class-books prescribed by the faculty. Lowell says, in one of his early poems referring to Harvard,-- "Tho' lightly prized the ribboned parchments three, Yet _collegisse juvat_, I am glad That here what colleging was mine I had."