Excerpt from Sketch of the Life of Dr. James McHenry, Aide-De-Camp and Private Secretary of General Washington, Aide-De-Camp of Maquis De La Fayette, Secretary of War From 1796 to 1800: A Paper Read Before the Maryland Historical Society, November 13th, 1876

Meantime the subject of this sketch was, in the year 1772, at Newark Academy in Delaware, then a school of much note, following his studies presumably, though it is possible he may have been not pupil but tutor, and we find him occasionally indulging in little flights of poetry or at least of versification, attributable perhaps rather to youth and rural surroundings than to any decided inspiration. His taste for elegant trifling with the muses did not, indeed, entirely desert him after he had arrived at years of discretion, but he made little claim to the honors of authorship, and kept, for the most part, for his own amusement or that of his friends, any accomplishments he may have had in the way of writing occasional verse.

At what date his academic studies were changed for professional ones we do not know, but we next find him studying medicine in Philadelphia under Dr. Benjamin Rush, who occupied a very high position in his own profession, and was also to become eminent both as patriot and as philantropist. It is said in Mr. G. W. Greene's Life of Nathaniel Greene, that McHenry had studied medicine rather as a science than as a profession, which may be true, though we are not aware of the authority for the statement.

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