brilliant and distinguished representatives; and besides illustrating Georgia, they have also illustrated such other States as South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, California and Florida. The above summary while altogether too meager to render full justice to the claims of this noted household will at least convey some idea of the deserved preeminence which belongs to the Lamars of Georgia.

CHAPTER XVII.

M

Mirabeau B. Lamar, of Texas.

IRABEAU BONAPARTE LAMAR possessed

a genius which may be appropriately described as many-sided. He was a soldier whose sword gleamed in the very forefront of the war for Texan independence. He was a statesman whose abilities made him the second president of the republic. He was an orator inferior to none in Texas. Beginning life as a merchant and a planter, he became a journalist; and from journalism he turned to law. He furthermore gained distinction as a diplomat; and before he died he was widely known. as a poet, his tuneful wares having been published in New York in 1859 under the title of "Verse Memorials."

Mr. Lamar was well advanced in the thirties before he left Georgia for Texas. He was not born at the old Lamar homestead in Putnam county, but near the site of the old State Capitol at Louisville, in Jefferson county, on August 16, 1798. It seems that John Lamar before moving into Putnam lived first in Jefferson and afterward in Warren counties; but as soon as the corner of the century was well turned he shifted his place of residence to the banks of the Little river, some eight miles from what was then the little village of Eatonton. And here it was

that Mirabeau spent his boyhood days. He seems to have been something of an artist during this adolescent period; for among the mural decorations of the old homestead a picture, which is said to have left an abiding impression upon Justice Lamar, is credited to the artistic brush of his uncle Mirabeau. The sketch, which was entitled a "Nightmare," portrayed a beautiful woman reposing upon a couch and a spectral horse's head protruding through a window immediately above her. The conception was striking and the work must have been cleverly executed to have proven so effective.

Neither Mirabeau nor his brother, the elder L. Q. C. Lamar, enjoyed the benefits of collegiate instruction. They seem to have possessed all the advantages which the immediate neighborhood could supply; but for some reason they were not sent to college. It could hardly have been for lack of means, since John Lamar was reputed to be fairly well off. If the tradition cited by Dr. Mayes could be relied upon, the failure of John Lamar to send his sons to the recognized educational founts would be sufficiently explained by the presence of the old bachelor uncle in the household. For the privilege of living under the same roof with an antiquarian scholar so classic in his accomplishments would have been almost equivalent to living in the shadow of the ancient Acropolis. Such an active dispensary of Attic culture would have made the expense of college tutors "wasteful and ridiculous excess," worse than gilding refined gold or carrying coals to Newcastle. It has already been stated that the uncle who loaded the young Lamars with the reverential tribute of his heroworship was Colonel Zachariah Lamar. He was not an old bachelor by any means, but he was an accomplished