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MEMOIR OF JARED SPARKS, LL.D.

by

BRANTZ MAYER.

President of the Maryland Historical Society:


[Illustration: Jared Sparks

_Anno Aetatis XL._]


[Illustration]

Prepared at the Request of the Society,
and Read Before Its Annual Meeting,
on Thursday Evening, February 7, 1867.







Printed for the Maryland Historical Society,
by John Murphy.
Baltimore, 1867.




MEMOIR.


IT has been a sad but not entirely unpleasant duty to prepare, at the
request of the Maryland Historical Society, a brief memoir of one of
our earliest and most distinguished Honorary Members, the late JARED
SPARKS, LL.D. The duty, though sad, is not without a pleasant
recompense, for the eulogium which a long-continued friendship and
intercourse demand can be bestowed with cordial truth.

Mr. Sparks was what we call, in America, a self-made man. Although his
life is a fair illustration of what an industrious person of talent and
common sense may compass by decision of character and a high aim, my
object in these observations is not to draw from his biography what has
been aptly called "ostentatious precepts and impertinent lessons." By a
self-made man I do not mean to class Mr. Sparks with that large and
influential body of citizens whose portraits adorn the illustrated
newspapers, and whose memoirs disclose the opinion that the making of
a great deal of money is the making of a very exemplary man. When I
speak of Mr. Sparks as a self-made man I use the phrase in a sense of
intellectual progress and success, founded on self-relying
discipline,--of mental culture and mental fruit, bringing him up to
honorable fame from low obscurity,--making him a lasting power in our
nation, nay, throughout the world, in our best society, in our
literature, in our institutions of learning; and, finally, bestowing on
him the just pecuniary rewards always due, yet seldom obtained in
America, by intellectual pursuits alone.

Jared Sparks, the son of Joseph and Eleanor Orcutt Sparks, was born in
Willington, Connecticut, on the 10th of May, 1789. The dawn of his life
was overshadowed by poverty. I do not know the character or pursuits of
his parents, but certainly they were very poor; nor have I found any
record of their early care over the child, or, that his youth was
comforted by the love and society of a brother or sister. The most
reliable account I have received of his infancy shows that he went,
with the childless sister of his mother, and her wayward husband, to
Washington county, New York, and that the eager boy obtained the scant
elements of education at the public schools of those days; working, at
the same time, on a farm for his livelihood, and sometimes serving a
dilapidated saw-mill, (his uncle's last resource,) whose slow
movements afforded him broken hours to pour over a copy of Guthrie's
Geography, which he always spoke of as a "real treasure."

Thus, there were no external influences to bring forth whatever powers
were inborn in his character. Probably, it was in spite of those
influences that he became a man of mark. His aunt, kind at all times,
is chiefly remembered for her gentleness and beauty; his mother, for
her devotion to reading, and mainly to the constant study of Josephus;
while the grandmother of these ladies, Bethiah Parker, is mentioned as
a singular enthusiast, who left to her posterity a manuscript volume of
poems and letters peculiar only from the fact that, while they are
vehicles of religious fervor, they are also autobiographical sketches,
in which she discloses (in 1757) her prophetic visions of the "terrible
times that are to come among the nations." There may have been some
inheritance by the youth from his mother of a fondness for books, for
he always spoke of her with great respect as a superior woman; but the
probability is that the intellectual turn of his mind originated within
itself, and was cherished by the affection he felt, and everywhere
inspired as a boy, and the personal interest with which such a
disposition is always repaid. His impressible mind was, doubtless,
affected by the grand or beautiful scenery amid which his early life
was passed. He was a bright pupil of all his teachers. One of them he
so soon excelled in acquirements that the honest pedagogue frankly
advised him