sincerity were all pre-eminent in his conduct, and carried captive the admiration of all men.  His devotion to his wife, to his friends, to his duty, was always conspicuous; and these are admired and honored, even by him who never had in his heart a feeling in common with one of these.  All these traits were so striking in Jackson’s character as to make them conspicuous.  They were more marked in his than in that of any other man of his day, because the impulses of his temperament were more prompt and potent.  They were natural to him, and always naturally displayed.  There was neither assumption of feeling nor deceit in its manifestation; all he evinced, bubbled up from his heart, naturally and purely as spring-water, and went directly to the heart.  These great and ennobling traits were not unfrequently marred by passion, and acts which threw a cloud over their brilliancy; but this, too, was natural:  the same soul which was parent to this violence and extravagance of passion, was, too, the source of all his virtues, and all were equally in excess.  The consequence of this violence were sometimes terrible.  They were evanescent, and, like a thunder-storm, seemed only to clear the atmosphere for the display of beautiful weather.

The triumphs of mind, unaided by education, sometimes are astonishing,—­in the case of General Jackson, perhaps, not more so than in many others.  The great Warwick of England, the putter-up and the puller-down of kings, did not know his letters; Marshal Soult, the greatest of Napoleon’s marshals, could not write a correct sentence in French; and Stevenson, the greatest engineer the world ever saw—­the inventor of the locomotive engine—­did not know his letters at twenty-one years of age, and was always illiterate.  It is a question whether such minds would have been greatly aided by education, or whether they might not have been greatly injured by it—­nature seeming to have formed all minds with particular proclivities.  These are more marked in the stronger intellects.  They direct to the pursuit in life for which nature has designed the individual:  should this idiosyncrasy receive the proper education from infancy, doubtless it would be aided to the more rapid and more certain accomplishment of the designs of nature.  To discover this in the child, requires that it should be strongly developed, and a close and intelligent observation on the part of the parent or guardian who may have the direction of the child’s education.  But this, in the system of education almost universally pursued, is never thought of; and the avocation of the future man is chosen for him, without any regard to his aptitudes for it, and often in disregard of those manifested for another.  Consequently, nature is thwarted by ignorance, and the individual drags on unsuccessfully in a hated pursuit through life.  Left alone, these proclivities become a passion, and where strongly marked, and aided by strength of will, they work out in wonderful perfection the designs of nature.