I will commence with Charles A. Clark giving a sketch of one each day–till I get through. He is now 20 years of age. He is a good student has a good mind and tolerable good acquirements. He is a good Christian and prompt in the performance of every duty. He is somewhat proud and despises the vulgar and vulgar things. He is a ready speaker-and abounding in a profusion of words. He will after teaching a few years become a Presbyterian clergyman–will be very successful and popular. He will be a fashionable and aristocratic preacher73150;and liked in a fashionable city or village rather than among the vulgar. He will be a close student and will delight in study through life and will delight in making his knowledge known. He will be a specious and elegant rather than a deep and convincing speaker.
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He is about 22 years of age brought up in the country and rather rough. Has a good constitution and a middling good mind. He is a deep rather than an elegant scholar. He is very plain and methodical and no ways proud. He is very decided and likes to have his own way. He is sometimes even obstinate. He is a member of the Methodist church and strict in the performance of every duty. He will be a Methodist preacher. He will be considered a pretty good man among them. He will never be a successful speaker nor a very celebrated man but he will be a good active and efficient preacher.

It is difficult to [give a sketch] for he is still young. He is between 17 and 18 and a very smart boy. He is considered precocious. He is a good-hearted fellow but a little proud and fond of display. He is an elegant and deep scholar-very fond of the classics and good in mathematics. He is an eloquent and fluent speaker and an elegant writer. He is very studious and strict in the performance of every duty. He is a moral young man and thinks much on religious subjects, but is not a professor. I think that after a few years he will study law. If so he will be very successful. He will be a fluent speaker and a pretty good reasoner–and being studious he will examine well his cases. If he enters into politics he will make a pretty good demagogue if he will lay aside his pride. He bids fair to be an efficient man in whatever business he may undertake.
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In the first place I will say then that he is a noble-minded young man-loved and respected by every one who knows him. No one can say a word against Fish. He is worthy of the respect shown to him. He was brought up in the country and is very plain and unassuming. He has a very dignified appearance and commands respect from every one. He is a hard student and a deep and finished scholar. Mathematics is his favorite study, and he spends all of his spare time in some deep mathematical calculation. He is also good in the classics and gives very elegant translations. He is an elegant writer full of thought and elegantly expressed. In writing on any particular subject he takes a peculiar course. He is a devoted Christian and strict in the performance of every duty. After he gets through here, he will teach a few years and then get him a farm and live an easy and retired life regardly [sic] of the world and all its cares. He will be honored and respected by all around him and can exert a great influence. He will if he chooses be honored with offices but he will never put himself forward.
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He is between 22 and 23 years of age. He has lived nearly all of his life in the village and in a tavern, is vulgar low and immoral. He seems to have but little sense of honor. He will do in every case what seems to be for his own advantage without any regard to others. Add to these a good deal of pride of the wrong kind. He has some bar room slang, a little wit and a great deal of confidence. He is a poor scholar in every sense of the word, yet he thinks he knows it all. He is no writer. There seems to be no order to connection between his thoughts. He is not an elegant speaker. He has a pretty good gift of the gab, a good deal of slang and confidence, and sometimes gets off quite a speech for the vulgar. The students all think lightly of his pretensions to scholarship–yet he is considered to be a hale jovial sort of a fellow who can swear, chew tobacco, tell a story or crack a joke with about as good a grace as any body. He will be a pettifogger and demagogue. After he gets through here, he will study law with some great attorney or in some law school, and after a while set up for himself. He will be somewhat successful rather on account of his good nature and slang than from deep study. He will be a successful demagogue. He will never have much principle about him. He will make something of a stir in the world.
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He is about 18 years of age and brought up in the city of Monroe. His character is hardly formed yet, and it is difficult to form any conjecture of what it will be. When he first came here, he was a very modest studious boy, but he has changed. He is now perfectly careless. He does not care whether he gets his lessons or not. He does not care for the opinion of the Profs. Nearly all he does now is to read poetry and plays and such-like books. He is consequently a very superficial scholar. He is a singular writer. He writes in a bombastic-pompous style full of comparisons, analogies, metaphors, allusions, antitheses, quotations and with but very little sense. His speaking is after the same style, with a great deal of formality, with abominable gestures and emphasis. He is a real good-natured, quiet sort of a fellow, so much so that he is sometimes called "the granny." He is possessed of many bad habits of mind and some of body. He is a moral young man, though not a professor of religion. He will study law and pettifogue some, though he will never be eminent as a lawyer for the reason that he will never study enough. He will be a good nature man and gain some friends. He will spend as quiet and easy a life as possible.
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He is about 26 years of age and is therefore about mature in mind and body. He is a man of fixed and noble principles and a devoted Christian. His character without a blemish. All that can be said against him is that he seems to have too much pride. He has some but not near so much as he seems to have. It requires an intimate acquaintance to know his character. He is somewhat reserved, and being of a mature age on these accounts he seems to some to have an overbearing way. He is a sound and deep though not an elegant scholar. He has a good mind and [is] well disciplined. He has good habits and has a great many friends. The Baptist church of which he is a member thinks a great deal of him. He is a student by charity [need-based scholarship-LRW]. After he gets through, he will teach awhile to pay up his debts and then become a preacher of the Gospel. As a preacher he will be liked pretty well. He will never make a pleasing speaker although he will be deep and logical. He will not be an elegant writer. His writings will be valued more for their good sense and sound logic than for ease and beauty of expression. He will be a good and noble-minded man, and what more can be asked. In a Sept. 27, 1844, letter to his family, Marsh dwelt on his debts and lack of funds. He hoped to raise money from his singing school, for which he charged a dollar an evening. He also hoped to become an assistant to the librarian, and added that his dorm room was conveniently located "on the same floor and directly opposite the Library." He mentioned having to carry wood up to the 4th floor. Of the newly arrived Professor Ten Brook, he said, "He pleases very well. He hears both the recitations of our class, so that we are under new tuition altogether." After the junior exhibition, he wrote his parents about the printed program: "You will see that your son occupies rather a prominent position for which I owe praise to the grace of God." He added later, "I hope I am not vain–"
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He has always lived in a village, is about 23 years of age. He is very self-important. He is very lazy and therefore a very poor scholar though he would like to leave the impression that he is something great. He has a great nack [sic] at getting along under difficult circumstances. He has spent his four years here and can not now read Greek so well as a freshman might, and has even forgotten some of the studies about which we have busied ourselves, and when asked says he never studied them. He is much the butt of the class in this respect. He is very close and stingy and is much the butt of the whole college on that account. He is a poor writer and no speaker at all. He has but very little sense of honor. After he gets through, he will be in a variety of business for a while. He intends to study medicine, but he will never do much in that profession. I think he will be an intriguing trader, and I think he will become rich and miserly, and when he makes money he will be careful not to spend any more than he can help. He is very troublesome to others without giving any recompense. He will run all over the building to get some good-natured classmate or Junior to read his Greek lesson for him when he ought to know it himself. The fellow is even after me now to get my notes on Moral Philosophy so that he may be prepared for examination. And yet the fellow dares to hold up his head and think himself as good as any body

"Sometimes called 'alphabet Rawls.' He has got name enough to be quite a fellow–so he is. He is about 25 years of age, brought up a student, pretty high-spirited and very sensitive. He is somewhat proud. Has a high sense of honor–he is a moral young man with very good principles. He is somewhat fickle-minded. He is a good student. Elegant and somewhat deep. He is a pretty good speaker, uses rather more words and ornament than reason, and makes quite a display. He is a beautiful writer. He has a romantic poetical turn of mind, and his compositions partake of the nature of his mind. He is something of a poet and a favorite among the ladies. After he gets through, he will study law, marry, soon have "a numerous wife and family," and will write now and then for some periodical and perhaps conduct one. He will be an aristocratic sort of fellow.
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