A youth who contemplated with a near and intimate knowledge the large manhood of Josiah Quincy; who listened to the eloquence of James Walker, or heard his expositions of the principal systems of ethics or metaphysics; or who sat at the feet of Judge Story, as he poured forth the lessons of jurisprudence in a clear and inexhaustible stream, caught an inspiration which transfigured the very soul of the pupil.
Josiah Quincy, "old Quin" as we loved to call him, was a very simple and a very high character.

He was born in Boston, February 4, 1772, just before the Revolutionary War.

It was said, I have no doubt truly, that the nurse who attended his mother at his birth went from that house to the wife of Copley, the painter, when her son, Lord Lyndhurst, was born.

Copley was a Tory, though a patriot and an ardent lover of his country.
His departure from Boston made Lord Lyndhurst an Englishman.
Quincy entered early into politics.

He was a candidate for Congress in the last century before he was twenty-five years old.