Excerpt from The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell: Ex-President of the South Carolina College, Late Professor of Theology in the Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina Introduction. - Birth. - His Father's Occupation, Character, and Early Death. - His Mother's Lineage. - Early Settlement op South Carolina. - Immigration of a Welsh Colony. - His Mother's Characteristics. History loves to trace the lineage of those whose lives have been heroic. It seems to add grace to virtue when it descends from sire to son, "And is successively, from blood to blood, The right of birth." Even the pride which it begets is shorn of its offence when it becomes the spur to honour, and the legacy of a spotless name is bequeathed, with increasing splendour, to succeeding heirs. The claim of birth is buffeted with scorn only when it stands upon the merit of the past, which it is powerless to reproduce. The rugged sense of mankind discriminates, with sufficient sagacity, betwixt the counterfeit aristocracy and the true. The veneration which is natural to us resents the fraud of an empty name, without the solid worth it was supposed to represent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.