The cheap and tawdry “business college,” recruited from guileless country youth ambitious to become merchant princes and railroad managers by a six months’ course in double entry and lightning arithmetic, had not then entered upon its dazzling career. Boys were trained to read extensively, to think clearly, to analyze patiently, to judge critically, to debate accurately and fluently, and in short to master whatever subject one might come upon. Over that old-time educational method might be written the aphorism of Quintilian, that “not what one may remember constitutes knowledge, but what one cannot forget.” We were not without noble intellectual exemplars in our Old South. The great thoughts of our home-born leaders, from Patrick Henry to Calhoun and Clay, were ever before us. Our college debates, our commencement orations, were fashioned after the severely classical models these men had left us. From the rostrum, the party platform, the pulpit, whenever a man spoke in those days it was expected and demanded that his speech be chaste, his thought elevated, his purpose ennobling. We were old-fashioned, I admit, in theme and method. We did not aim so much to please and entertain as to convince and inspire. The forum was as sacred as in the palmiest days of Athens and Demosthenes. About it centered our chief ambitions. We had not come upon a degenerate age when a much-exploited college graduate, lyceum lecturer, and “D.D.”—as I heard him before a great audience of university young gentlemen and ladies the other day—could descend to a contemptible buffoonery of delineation of the “American Girl” as his theme, and include in his printed repertoire such subjects as “The Tune the Old Cow Died of,” which confirmed some of us who heard him in the conviction that Balaam’s ass is yet lineally represented in ways of public speech and action. [Illustration: ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.]