Flournoys, became connected with historic families of Virginia. There was a tradition in the Lanier family as well as in the Washington family, that Thomas Lanier married an aunt of George Washington, but this has been proved to be untrue.1 The Laniers were related by marriage to the Washingtons of Surry County. They established themselves in the middle of the eighteenth century in Brunswick and Lunenburg counties of Virginia, as prosperous planters; they did not, however, rank either in dignity or in wealth with the older gentry of Virginia. In a letter written in 1877 Lanier gives in full the various branches of the Lanier family as they separated from this point and went into all parts of the United States. One branch joined the pioneers who went up through Tennessee into Kentucky and thence to Indiana. The most famous of these was Mr. J. F. D. Lanier, who played a prominent part in the development of the railroad system of the West, and at the time of the Civil War had become one of the leading bankers in New York city. He was a financial adviser of President Lincoln, and represented the government abroad in some important transactions. He was of genuine help to Sidney Lanier

1 William and Mary Quarterly, iii, 71-74, 1895 (article by Horace Edwin Hayden); iii, 137-139, October, 1894 (by Moncure D. Conway, with editorial comment); iv, 35–36, July, 1895 (by the editor, Lyon G. Tyler).

at critical times in the latter's life. His son, Mr. Charles Lanier, now a banker of New York, was a close friend of the poet, and after his death presented busts of him to Johns Hopkins University and the public library of Macon.

The branch of the Lanier family with which Sidney was connected, moved from Virginia into Rockingham County, N. C. Sampson Lanier was a well-to-do farmer - a country gentleman, "fond of good horses and fox hounds." Several of his sons went to the newer States of Georgia and Alabama. Of these was Sterling Lanier, the grandfather of the poet, who lived for a while in Athens, Ga., and was afterwards a hotel-keeper in Macon and Montgomery. By the time of the Civil War he had amassed a considerable fortune. In a letter written in 1844 from Macon we learn that he was an ardent Methodist. His daughters were being educated in the Wesleyan Female College in that city, his son Sidney had sailed recently from Charleston to France, and expected to travel through Sicily, Italy, and other parts of Europe on account of his health. He was giving his younger sons the best education then attainable in Georgia.

His son Robert Sampson Lanier had four years before returned from Randolph-Macon College, Virginia, and was at the time the letter was written beginning the practice of law. He

never became a lawyer of the first rank, but he was universally esteemed for his " fine presence," his "social gentleness," and his "persistent habit of methodical industry." "During all of his long and active professional life," says the late Washington Dessau," he never allowed anything to interfere with his devotion to his calling as a lawyer. No desire for office attracted him; no other business of profit or honor ever diminished for a moment his devotion for his professional duties. In the year 1850 he was admitted to the bar by the Supreme Court of Georgia, and from that period down to the time of his death the name of his firm appears in nearly every volume of the reports, indicating the wide extent of his business. . . . As a lawyer, while not aspiring to be a brilliant advocate, he was a most profound and able reasoner, thoroughly versed and grounded in the knowledge of the common law, well prepared with a knowledge of current decisions and in the learning that grows out of them. . . . In his social intercourse he was a gentleman of the purest and most refined type. At his own home, at the homes of others, in casual meetings, in travel, everywhere, he always exhibited toward those who met him an unbroken front of courtesy, gentleness, and refinement.” 1

1 Report of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Georgia Bar Association, Atlanta, 1894.

He was just such a lawyer as Lanier would have become had he remained in that profession; indeed, son and father were very much alike. The father was a man of "considerable literary acquirements and exquisite taste." He was fond of Shakspere, Addison, and Sir Walter Scott, having the literary taste of the gentlemen of the old South. The letters written to his son show decided cultivation. They show also that he was in thorough sympathy with his son's intellectual life. The letter written by Lanier to his father from Baltimore in 1873 may lead one to think otherwise. Mr. Lanier was opposed, as were most of the men of his section, to a young man's entering upon a musical or poetic career, but more than two hundred letters written by son to father and many from father to son prove that their relations during the entire career of the poet were unusually close and sympathetic. In the earlier years, Lanier sent his poems to his father, and valued highly his criticism, and in later years he received from him financial aid and counsel.

While Robert Sampson Lanier was at college in Virginia he met Mary Jane Anderson, the daughter of Hezekiah Anderson, a Virginia planter who attained success in the political life of that State. They were married in 1840, and Sidney was their first-born. The poet thus in

herited on his mother's side Scotch-Irish blood, an element in Southern life which has been often underestimated. She proved to be a hard-working woman, caring little for social life, but thoroughly interested in the religious training of her children. Her husband, although nominally a Methodist, was not actively identified with the church, but willingly acquiesced in the somewhat rigid Presbyterian discipline that prevailed in the home. The children - Sidney, Clifford, and Gertrude were taught the strictest tenets of the Calvinistic creed. When Lanier afterwards, in Baltimore, lived a somewhat more liberal life both as to creed and conducthe wrote: "If the constituents and guardians. of my childhood - those good Presbyterians who believed me a model for the Sunday-school children of all times could have witnessed my acts and doings this day, I know not what groans of sorrowful regret would arise in my behalf."

The seriousness of this life was broken, however, on week days. Southern Puritanism differed from the early New England Puritanism in a certain affectionateness and sociability. The mother could play well on the piano, and frequently sang with the children hymns and popular melodies. Between the two brothers there was from the first the most beautiful relation, as throughout the rest of their lives: comrades in