forgotten their existence. It is true I have an old and rather a large volume that contains a variety of recollections, but it is very much defaced by time, many leaves torn out, many sentences obliterated, and others in as cramped a hand as I am now writing. But to gratify you, my dear friend, I will try to render a page of it legible; and if it will giv you any pleasure I shall be amply repaid, and will ransack my memory to say something about Sir William Pepperell, too great a name to be forgotten by one unused to titles, unacquainted with wealth or grandeur.

At the end of her sketch of Sir William and his house, she thus closes :

Thus, my dear friend, at last, as far as was in my power, I have complied with your request. Had the wish been expressed a few years ago I could have made out a tolerable narrative of my reminiscences. I could have taken Portsmouth, Kittery Point, and old York as the scenes of my early associations.

The most interesting of the reminiscences is that of a visit to "Long Lane" with her mother, when she was twelve years old [1770]. This was the home of Madam Ursula Cutts, the widow of John Cutts, the first president of New Hampshire. It is on the left bank of the Piscataqua, three or four miles above Portsmouth. "Madam Ursula " as she was called, was murdered in her own meadow where she had gone with a maid servant to carry refreshments to her men in the hay fields, when she and her haymakers were shot down and scalped. This was in 1694. At the time of Madam Wood's visit the place was owned by an old lady, a relative of her mother, who kept the place up in the original style. It is described as seen by her childish eyes in 1770. It is pleasant reading for an antiquarian.

Dr. Morton, in whose family Madam Wood spent her last years, says: "At the age of ninety-four she could be a delightful companion to her great great grandchildren, or to her nephews, George B. Emerson, or George B. Cheever, versed as they were in much of the science of the day." She died January 6, 1825, at the uncommon age of ninety-five years and three months.

ASHUR WARE.

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Read before the Maine Historical Society, May 20, 1887.

BY GEORGE F. TALBOT.

AMONG the persons named as corporators in the act incorporating the Maine Historical Society is the name of Ashur Ware, who resided in Portland from the year 1817 to the year 1873, the time of his death. He was the first secretary of state of the new state of Maine. He was a tutor and afterward a professor in Harvard College. He edited a political paper in Boston, and afterward the "Eastern Argus" in Portland. He is best known as the judge of the United States District Court, having by his eminent talents, learning and integrity adorned that high position for the unusually long term of forty-four years, or from 1822 till 1866. He was an easy and graceful writer, equipped with accurate and comprehensive erudition, and possessing warm, benevolent and popular sympathies; and his felicitous style gives grace and dignity to some of the earlier publications of this Society to which he contributed. The "Introductory Remarks" at the beginning of the first volume of the Society's collections are from his pen, and are an exhibition of his powers of literary expression.

Judge Ware was born in Sherburne, Massachusetts, February 10, 1782, and was the third child of Joseph Ware and his wife Grace Cooledge.

His grandfather was John Ware, a descendant in the sixth degree from Robert Ware, who in 1640 emigrated from the eastern part of England, near Boston, to Dedham, Massachusetts, the first home in this country of the family.

Robert had espoused the Puritan cause with so much zeal as to make his emigration a matter of prudence, at a time when the fortunes of his party had suggested the same course to such leaders as Hampden and Cromwell. Of John Ware, who moved to Sherburne, Joseph, father of the judge, was the eldest, and Henry,

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the eminent professor of divinity at Harvard, was the youngest

son.

Joseph Ware was a conspicuous personage in his town, filling several municipal offices, and having the honor of having served as a soldier in the war of the Revolution, and of losing an arm in the battle of White Plains.

The personal traits of Judge Ware seem largely due to hereditary influence, and furnish a striking confirmation of the law of intellectual and moral descent; for in his early years his father Joseph Ware, the farmer of Sherburne, had a taste for literature and particularly for scientific culture. He had partially fitted himself for college, but for lack of means was compelled to forego his ambition for the career of a scholar. He never however lost his interest in mathematics, astronomy and philosophical studies, which he pursued from a genuine enthusiasm during such leisure as a working-man's life afforded. His mainly self-acquired education and his well-known probity gave him just consideration among his neighbors, and fitted him well for the many municipal offices he was called to fill. Sometimes he was employed as a teacher of the public schools, and in that employment he acquired a wide reputation for the thoroughness of his discipline and the excellence of his methods.

In the religious controversy that agitated New England in his day, and broke the unity of its faith, he took the liberal and more rationalistic side, cherishing, somewhat in advance, the reformatory and innovating ideas begotten of a more modern spirit.

Fathers are very apt to pass to their children their own unfulfilled ambitions; and Joseph Ware, though a poor farmer, was willing to make sacrifices to give his son the educational advantages that he had desired himself. He not only did this but he aided his own brother John in paying the collegiate expenses of their younger brother, Henry, and so in giving to the country that brilliant line of teachers, preachers, scholars and writers of which he was the ancestor.

It did not greatly grieve Joseph Ware to find that his third child showed little skill and less interest in the manual labor of the farm, and devoted to a greedy and appreciative reading of every book that came within his reach the nights and days that farmers' sons are usually called upon to give to the care of crops and

cattle. The judicious father recognized the better way his son had chosen, and was glad to see revived in him his own scholarly tastes and enthusiasm.

When this young son was fourteen years old, his inaptitude for a farmer's life, and his dominant taste for science had become so apparent to his father, that he gave him notice he should do what he could to send him to college. Many times in his after life in telling of the hardships and hopes of his youth, Judge Ware spoke of that day, when his father opened before him this door to his ambition, as the happiest of his life.

Ashur was fitted for college by private tuition partly by his father and partly by the minister of the town, Rev. Mr. Brown, and was entered at Harvard in the year 1800 in the same class with Doctor Chapin, president of Waterville College, Andrews Norton, the biblical critic, and other men of nearly equal celebrity. After graduating he was for a time an assistant to Doctor Abbot in his famous Exeter Academy. After that he was for a year a private tutor in the family of his uncle Henry in Cambridge. In 1807 he was appointed tutor in Greek, and from 1811 to 1815 he was a professor in the same department of study in Harvard College. Among the four or five hundred youths, who received instruction from him during this period, were Edward Everett, Peleg Sprague, the historians William H. Prescott, John G. Palfrey and George Bancroft, Presidents Sparks and Walker and Caleb Cushing.

Judge Ware resigned his professorship in 1815, and after hav, ing entertained the purpose of preparing himself for the pulpit abandoned it, and betook himself to the study of law, first in the office of Loammi Baldwin in Cambridge, and afterward with his classmate, Joseph E. Smith of Boston. He seemed, however, to have been better known in Boston as a politician and writer than as a practitioner absorbed in the interests of litigating clients, for, in company with Henry Orne, he edited there a democratic paper called the "Boston Yankee," and became the orator of his party for the Fourth of July, giving to his oration, according to the customs of the time, all the effective range and force, that a keen satire of the opposition, propelled by strong feeling and winged with brilliant rhetoric, could impart.

But he did not seem to have found in the chief city of his na

tive state, and near the home of his distinguished family, a lucrative opening for his legal learning or for his editorial or forensic talents; for the very next year he moved to Portland, and entered with warmth into its more congenial politics - the chief doctrine of which then was the doctrine of home rule. He bought to Maine considerable reputation as a scholar, writer and orator, and was not long in finding ample scope for the exercise of his versatile abilities. He was at once placed in charge of the old demoocratic weekly, the "Argus," and as Mr. Willis says, "by his vigorous pen gave it a character which it had never attained before nor kept up after he left it." His abilities were recognized in his selection as orator for the due celebration of the Fourth of July, and his auditors must have noted that a higher than the customary standard of eloquence had been offered them in his graceful periods and in the wealth of his historic and classical allusions.

He plunged heartily into the pending controversy about sepa-· ration for which the Portland people had been for years stoutly battling, and when at last, after many years, the boon of state independence was reluctantly conceded by the parent Commonwealth, the office of Secretary of State was fitly assigned to him. In the comparative rarity of highly educated men, and from the fact that the able first governor, King, had more reputation as a man of affairs and a natural ruler of men than of literary expertness, it has become manifest from some preserved correspondence that the first secretary, besides recording the statutes and engrossing the commissions, was called upon to put in decorous and devout language, fit to be read on Sunday from the pulpit, the Fast and Thanksgiving proclamations, by which the state continued to maintain some loose connection with the church.

For the second governor, Judge Parris, then judge of the United States District Court, was in 1822 elected; and to the bench made vacant by his resignation, Mr. Ware was appointed. The selection, though made, as in several instances in our state history, of a man without any judicial and very little professional experience, and of one whose reputation had been acquired in politics and partisan controversy wherein those dispassionate and candid mental processes which a judge must exercise are scarcely brought into requisition, proved to be an entirely fitting

one.

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