[
103]
it needed much administrative skill and some money.
Neither
Cogswell nor
Bancroft was a man of fortune.
Instead of twenty boys, they had at one time one hundred and twenty-seven, nearly fifty of whom had to be kept through the summer vacation.
They had many Southern pupils and, as an apparent consequence, many bad debts,
Mr. Cogswell estimating a loss of two thousand dollars from this cause in a single year; and sometimes they had to travel southward to dun delinquent parents.
The result of it all was that
Bancroft abandoned the enterprise after seven years, in the summer of 1830; while
Cogswell, who held on two years longer, retired with health greatly impaired and a financial loss of twenty thousand dollars. Thus ended the Round Hill School.
While at Round Hill, Mr. Bancroft prepared some text-books for his pupils, translating Heeren's “Politics of ancient Greece” (1824) and Jacobs's Latin Reader (1825),--the latter going through several editions.
His first article in the “North American Review,” then the leading literary journal in the United States, appeared in October, 1823, and was a notice of Schiller's “Minor poems,” with many translations.
From this time forward he wrote in almost every volume, but always on classical or German themes, until in January, 1831, he took up “The Bank ”