Horace Holley, old Transylvania University's celebrated president, was born at Salisbury, Connecticut, February 13, 1781, the son of Luther Holley, a wealthy merchant. He was fitted at Williams College for Yale, from which institution he was graduated in 1803. Holley studied law in New York for awhile, but soon relinquished it for theology, which he returned to Yale to pursue. In 1805 he was appointed to his first pastorate. Going to Boston in 1809, as pastor of the Hollis Street Unitarian church, he at once made a great reputation for himself as an eloquent pulpit orator. Holley was at Hollis Street for nine years, during which time he was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, as well as a member of several civic boards. He was elected president of Transylvania University, of Lexington, in 1817, and he journeyed to Kentucky in the following spring, where he went carefully over the ground and finally decided to accept the position. He entered almost at once upon the most difficult task of converting a grammar school into a great university. Success soon crowned his efforts, however, and Transylvania took her place by the side of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, as one of the higher seats of learning in the United States. In at least one year under the Holley rÉgime, Transylvania had the largest student body in this country. The institution was as well known in New York or London, among scholars, as it was in the West. Several of the professors were men of national reputation, and the students came from all parts of the United States. Never before in the South or West has a seat of learning had higher hopes for the future, or greater success or reputation than had Transylvania under Horace Holley. Then the Kentucky Presbyterians and others launched Dame Rumor, freighted with falsehoods and misrepresentations galore. The president was charged with every crime in the calendar: he was an atheist, an agnostic, a blasphemer, a wine-bibber, and all that was evil. The whole truth was this: he was a Unitarian, holding the Christ to be the greatest personality in history, but denying him as the very Son of God. This his prejudiced, ill-advised enemies were unable to understand. Driven to desperation by the bitter crusade that was being waged against him, Holley resigned, in March, 1827, after nine years of great success as head of the University, which after his departure, fell away to almost nothing. He went from Kentucky to Louisiana, where he endeavored to re-organize the College of New Orleans, and in which work he wore himself out. Late in the summer he and his wife took passage for New York, but he contracted yellow-fever, and, on July 31, 1827, he died. His body was consigned to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, but his fame is secure as an American educator of distinguished ability. The finest bit of prose he ever wrote, perhaps, is contained in one of his Kentucky letters to his wife in Boston, written while he was in Lexington looking over the lay of the land, which, as subsequent events proved, he utterly failed to anticipate in its most dangerous and damning aspect.

Bibliography. A Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley, LL. D., by Charles Caldwell, M. D. (Boston, 1828); More Colonial Homesteads, by Marion Harland (New York, 1899); Lore of the Meadowland, by J. W. Townsend (Lexington, Kentucky, 1911).

MR. CLAY AND COLONEL MEADE

[From A Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley, LL. D., by Charles Caldwell, M. D. (Boston, 1828)]

I wrote a hasty letter to you on the night of my arrival. I shall now he able to speak a little more in detail.

The town and the vicinity are very handsome. The streets are broad, straight, paved, clean, and have rows of trees on each side. The houses are of brick almost universally, many of them in the midst of fields, and have a very rural and charming appearance. The taste is for low houses, generally two, sometimes even but one story high, like English cottages. This taste gives an effect that eyes accustomed to the high buildings of an Atlantic city, where there is but little room, are not at first pleased with. But it is a taste adapted to the circumstances, and to me is not unpleasant.

I have taken lodgings at the principal hotel of the place, where I have a drawing-room to receive calls, which were yesterday until dinner almost innumerable.... In the afternoon I walked about town with Mr. Clay, and called at a few charming houses. I visited also the Athenaeum, an institution not yet furnished with many books, but well supplied with newspapers, and the best periodicals. I find everything of this sort, which is valuable, from Boston and the other Atlantic cities.

This morning I breakfasted at Mr. Clay's, who lives a mile and a half from town. He arrived here only three days before me. Ashland is a very pleasant place, handsomer than I anticipated. The grounds are beautiful, the lawns and walks extensive, the shrubbery luxuriant, and the garden well supplied. The native forest of ash in the rear adds a charming effect to the whole. After breakfast Mr. Clay rode in with me, and we went with the trustees, by appointment, to the college, to visit the professors and students. They were all collected in the largest hall to receive us. I made a short address, which was received in a kind manner. I was then conducted to the library, the apparatus, and the recitation rooms. The library is small, and the apparatus smaller. There is no regular division of students into classes as in other colleges, and but few laws. Everything is to be done, and so much the better, as nothing is to be reformed. Almost the whole is proposed to be left to me to arrange. I am now making all necessary inquiries, and a meeting of the trustees is to be called next week.

After this visit, I went with a party of ladies and gentlemen, nine miles into the country to the seat of Colonel [David] Meade [1744-1838] where we dined and passed the day. This gentleman, who is near seventy, is a Virginian of the old school. He has been a good deal in England, in his youth, and brought home with him English notions of a country seat, though he is a great republican in politics. He and his wife dress in the costume of the olden time. He has the square coat and great cuffs, the vest of the court, short breeches, and white stockings, at all times. Mrs. Meade has the long waist, the white apron, the stays, the ruffles about the elbows, and the cap of half a century ago. She is very mild and ladylike, and though between sixty and seventy, plays upon the piano-forte with the facility and cheerfulness of a young lady. Her husband resembles Colonel Pickering in the face, and the shape of the head. He is entirely a man of leisure, never having followed any business, and never using his fortune but in adorning his place and entertaining his friends and strangers. No word is ever sent to him that company is coming. To do so offends him. But a dinner—he dines at the hour of four—is always ready for visitors; and servants are always in waiting. Twenty of us went out today, without warning, and were entertained luxuriously on the viands of the country. Our drink consisted of beer, toddy, and water. Wine, being imported and expensive, he never gives; nor does he allow cigars to be smoked in his presence. His house consists of a cluster of rustic cottages, in front of which spreads a beautiful, sloping lawn, as smooth as velvet. From this diverge, in various direction, and forming vistas terminated by picturesque objects, groves and walks extending over some acres. Seats, Chinese temples, verdant banks, and alcoves are interspersed at convenient distances. The lake, over which presides a Grecian temple, that you may imagine to be the residence of the water nymphs, has in it a small island, which communicates with the shore by a white bridge of one arch. The whole is surrounded by a low rustic fence of stone, surmounted and almost hidden by honey-suckle and roses, now in full flower, and which we gathered in abundance to adorn the ladies. Everything is laid out for walking and pleasure. His farm he rents, and does nothing for profit. The whole is in rustic taste. You enter from the road, through a gate between rude and massive columns, a field without pretension, wind a considerable distance through a noble park to an inner gate, the capitals to whose pillars are unique, being formed of the roots of trees, carved by nature. Then the rich scene of cultivation, of verdure and flower-capped hedges, bursts upon you. There is no establishment like this in our country. Instead of a description, I might have given you its name, "Chaumiere du Prairies."