CHAPTER I.
Colonel Burr's study of the law [1] has been already briefly noticed.
He brought to that study a classic education as complete as could, at
that time, be acquired in our country; and to this was added a
knowledge of the world, perhaps nowhere better taught than in the
camp, as well as a firmness and hardihood of character which military
life usually confers, and which is indispensable to the success of the
forensic lawyer. He was connected in the family circle with _two[2]
eminent jurists, who were at hand to stimulate his young ambition, and
to pour, in an almost perpetual stream, legal knowledge into his mind,
by conversation and by epistolary correspondence. The time he spent in
his studies preparatory to his admission would be considered short at
the present day; but (to use the language of another) "it is to be
recollected that at that time there were no voluminous treatises upon
the mere routine of practice to be committed to memory, without adding
a single legal principle or useful idea to the mind, and which only
teach the law student, as has been said of the art of the rhetorician,
'how to name his tools.' Burr, fortunately for his future professional
eminence, was not destined to graze upon this barren moor. He spent
his clerkship in reading and abstracting, with pen in hand, Coke and
the elementary writers, instead of Sellon and Tidd; and learnt law as
a science, and not as a mechanical art.
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