students: “Tuition five pounds a year, one half in cash, the other in property; boarding nine pounds a year, in property, pork, corn, tobacco, etc.” In ten years more the seminary, having absorbed the Kentucky Academy established by the Presbyterians, expanded into the “Transylvania University,” with first an academical department, and the following year adding one of medicine and another of law. Thus Lexington, although still a small town, became what was then called “the literary and intellectual centre west of the Alleghanies,” and a point of great attraction to people of means and of social wants and pretensions. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that it was a quiet and sedate college town like those of New England. Many years later, in 1814, a young Massachusetts Yankee, Amos Kendall, who had drifted to Lexington in pursuit of profitable employment, and was then a private teacher in Henry Clay's family, wrote in his diary: “I have, I think, learned the way to be popular in Kentucky, but do not, as yet, put it in practice. Drink whiskey and talk loud, with the fullest confidence, and you will hardly fail of being called a clever fellow.” This was not the only “way to be popular,” but was certainly one of the ways. When the Lexington of 1797, the year of Clay's arrival there, is spoken of as a “literary and intellectual centre,” the meaning is that it was an outpost of civilization still surrounded, and to a great extent permeated, by the spirit of border life. The
