[Footnote 7: Our own college furnishes most conclusive proof of the truth of these remarks. I will give only two examples, and comment will be unnecessary. John Randolph, L. W. Tazewell, Robert B. Taylor, and John Thompson, author of the letters signed “Curtius,” were the heavy product of one season; while P. P. Barbour, B. W. Leigh, Chapman Johnson, Henry St. George Tucker, (President of Court of Appeals,) Robert Stanard, J. C. Cabell, and Lewis Harvie were that of another; and during the whole time William and Mary College rarely numbered more than sixty students. I have been informed, on inquiry into this subject, that the northern colleges, especially Yale and Harvard, furnish similar instances. It is said, for example, that the class in which Harrison Gray Otis graduated at Cambridge, yielded a most extraordinary number of great men in proportion to its size.] Let me advise you by all means to discard at once that absurd notion, which has made an illiterate man of many a vain student—that genius delights not in labor. Very different is the fact; love of study, and unshaken perseverance in the pursuit of its object, is the true characteristic of genius every where. The men of genius who have built up the great systems of philosophy, and laid the foundation of civilization, have all been laborious students, as well as deep thinkers; they have been the true working-men of the world. Such men were Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes and Cicero, of antiquity, and such have been the Luthers, the Bacons, and Newtons of modern times, and such all men are compelled to be, who possess a laudable ambition for distinction and usefulness. In the language of Doctor Johnson we may assert, that “all the performances of human art, at which we look with praise and wonder, are the results of perseverance. It is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united by canals. It is therefore of the utmost importance that those who have any intention of {769} deviating from the beaten track of life, and of acquiring a reputation superior to names hourly swept away by time among the refuse of fame, should add to their reason and their spirit the _power of persisting in their purposes_, acquire the art of sapping what they cannot batter, and the habit of vanquishing obstinate resistance by obstinate attacks.”