"His splendid physique, in which he surpassed everybody in the region; his noble stature and well-proportioned form; his head finely poised, and around it a halo of parental benignity, its perpetual and unfading crown; these struck every one at first sight, and prepossessed all in his favor. I know of none with whom to compare him in these respects except Ezekiel Webster. In his whole spirit and mien, in look and word and action, he was a father, and his whole administration was parental in the best sense of the word. This benignity, as we learn from his 'Memoir,' marked his subsequent career as president of the East Windsor Theological School. His biographer, taking notice of the fact that 'the perversities of human nature make their appearance in such institutions as well as elsewhere,' observes that 'the strong affections of the father in him occasionally swayed the firmness of the tutor and governor, and rendered him indulgent and yielding in cases where there was call for the peremptory and authoritative.' In the first two years of our college life, from the fall of 1824 to the spring of 1826, two or three instances of wrongdoing passed unnoticed which perhaps deserved such a mode of treatment. There were, moreover, it is to be confessed, irregularities and bad practices among students in all the classes at that period, but they were exceptional, so far as my knowledge of them extended, and would have required a system of espionage to detect them, or informers from the guilty ones themselves. Dartmouth however, at its worst, in that period, was not one whit behind any other college in New England, in its general tone of morals, in observance of law, in habits of study and in scholarly attainments. There were not a few whose sense of honor was very high, and as they were popular and influential, they in some degree necessarily gave tone to others. Nay, surrounded by such an atmosphere of benignity--of which every student was more or less conscious, feeling it not only in the presence of the president, but also more or less in our connection with every other officer of the college without exception--I think there was far less tendency to excess, far less of the irritation of inclination against prohibition of law; and assuredly there was never apparent a disposition to rebel from hope of impunity through the recognized forbearance of our teachers.