Ancestry, opportunity and events all conspired to equip Charles Sumner with those implements that make man great. Like Phillips, he was a descendant of the early settlers of Boston. His father led the men who delivered Garrison out of the hands of the mob, and who told the excited populace that unless Boston was careful "our children's heads will be broken by cannon-balls." The plastic, critical hours of his youth were spent in Harvard College and in the law office of Judge Story. Never interested in philosophy and metaphysics, he was surpassed by few as a master of the humanities, general literature, and the story of the rise and progress of democracy and free institutions. Not a man of genius, Charles Sumner was gifted with talent of a very high order. He had, what is perhaps better than genius, a capacity for sustained labour and prodigious industry. He did nothing by halves. In his chosen realm he became a master of the details of every movement related to free institutions, since the days of the republics of Greece and Switzerland, Holland and England. Long after other students had blown out their lights, Charles Sumner's window was still flaming. At a very early epoch he exhibited his tenacity of will and his constitutional inability to change his mind. Once he planned with a companion to walk to Boston on Saturday morning, starting at half-past seven. When the hour struck, a snow-storm was raging. But having decided to go to Boston, to Boston the student went alone, floundering through the blizzard. Snow-drifts were little things, but changing his plan was an impossible thing. The centre of his character, about which all else revolved, was a certain axis of pride and self-esteem, which may be pardoned, perhaps, in view of the fact that the world takes a man largely upon his own estimate of personal worth. In those days the atmosphere of Boston was charged with enthusiasm for education and the humanities. Among young Sumner's friends were Prescott, who was writing the history of Spain and Mexico; Bancroft, who was outlining his history of the United States; Story, the jurist; Horace Mann, the educator; Dr. Howe, the father of the movement for the education of the deaf and dumb; Emerson, Longfellow, Channing and Whittier--all were not simply friends but correspondents of Charles Sumner.