After graduating at Harvard College in 1828, he taught in the Round Hill School at Northampton, Massachusetts. He graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1832, and fl 1833 he was admitted to the bar in Boston, where he entered into partnership with Charles Sumner. He was a member of the state House of Representatives in 1836, of the state Senate in 1850, and of the state constitutional convention of 1853, and in 1866-70 was United States district attorney for Massachusetts.
He devoted a large portion of his time to literature. He became a member of the editorial staff of the Christian Register, a Unitarian weekly, in 1833; in 1834 he became editor of The American Jurist (1829-1843), a legal journal to which Sumner, Simon Greenleaf and Theron Metcalf contributed; and from 1856 to i861 he was an associate editor of the Boston Courier.
His publications include an edition of Edmund Spenser's works (in 5 vols., 1839); Selections from the Writings of Walter Savage Landor (1856); Six Months in Italy (2 vols., 1853); Life and Campaigns of George B. McClellan (1864); a part of the Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (1876); besides a series of school readers and many articles in periodicals and encyclopaedias.