[132]
Lucius Manlius Sargent.
Surgeon 2d Mass. Vols. (Infantry), May 28, 1861; Captain 1st Mass. Cavalry, October 31, 186; Major, January 2, 1864; Lieutenant-Colonel, September 30, 1864; killed near Bellfield, Va., December 9, 1864.Lucius Manlius Sargent, Jr., was born in Boston, September 15, 1826,—the son of Lucius Manlius and Sarah (Dunn) Sargent. He gave early evidence of much talent, and of a daring and impetuous nature. It is recorded of him as a child, that, when a friendly clergyman had taken him on his knee, and asked him what he meant to do in life, he answered, ‘I don't know, sir, whether to be a minister or a highwayman; but I should n't like to be anything half-way.’ ‘On another occasion, having by accident fired in an upper chamber a pistol which he was forbidden to touch, and hearing the rush of the alarmed family on the stairs, he cautiously lowered himself a few feet, and then dropped from a third-story window, as the only method of gaining an instant audience of his kind old nurse in the basement, to whom he poured out his griefs, and then manfully walked up stairs to explain the offence, and receive punishment.’ He had from childhood a great love of reading, a retentive memory, and a very ready imagination. He delighted in poetry, and wrote verses with great facility. His instructors in preparation for college were Rev. W. A. Stearns, with Messrs. Charles K. Dillaway and Stephen M. Weld; and in 1844 he entered the Freshman Class of Harvard University. In college he entered at once upon the rather perilous career which attends the class wit and satirist. In rhymes, bon-mots, and caricatures he had no rival; while his varied intellectual tastes, with his love of athletic exercises, and of gay society, furnished temptations to draw him away from the regular college studies. The paths of the class wit and the class first scholar rarely coincide. Yet one of the first scholars in Sargent's class volunteers the testimony, that,
