His earliest considerable effort in our behalf was a lecture delivered before us on the 31st of October, 1833. It was entitled "Anecdotes of Early Local History," and will be found in the second volume of his collected works, now lying upon our table, with an extended note or appendix containing many interesting details concerning the Society, its objects and its members. But it is only within the last nine or ten years, and since his public life-so far as office is necessary to constitute public life was brought to a close, that he has been in the way of taking an active part in our proceedings. No one can enter the room in which we are gathered without remembering how frequently, during that period, his voice has been heard among us in rendering such honors to others, as now, alas! we are so unexpectedly called to pay to himself. No one can forget his admirable tributes to the beloved Prescott, to the excellent Nathan Hale, to the venerated Quincy, among our immediate associates; to Daniel D. Barnard of Albany and Henry D. Gilpin of Philadelphia, to Washington Irving, to Hallam, to Humboldt, to Macaulay, among our domestic and foreign honorary members.

Still less will any one be likely to forget the noble eulogy which he pronounced, at our request, on the 9th of December, 1858, upon that remarkable self-made man whom we have ever delighted to honor as our largest benefactor, and in whose pictured presence we are at this moment assembled. Often as I have listened to our lamented friend, since the year 1824,- when I followed him with at least one other whom I see before me to Plymouth Rock, and heard his splendid discourse on the Pilgrim Fathers, I can hardly recall any thing of his, more striking of its kind, or more characteristic of its author, than that elaborate delineation of the life of Thomas Dowse. No one, certainly, who was present on the occasion, can fail to recall the exhibition which he gave us, in its delivery, of the grasp and precision of his wonderful memory, when in describing the collection of water colors, now in the Athenæum gallery, which was the earliest of Mr. Dowse's possessions, he repeated, without faltering, the unfamiliar names of more than thirty of the old masters from whose works they were copied, and then turning at once to the

description of the library itself, as we see it now around us, proceeded to recite the names of fifty-three of the ancient authors of Greek and Roman literature, of nineteen of the modern German, of fourteen of the Italian, of forty-seven of the French, of sixteen or seventeen of the Portugese and Spanish, making up in all an aggregate of more than one hundred and eighty names of artists and authors, many of them as hard to pronounce as they were difficult to be remembered, but which he rehearsed, without the aid of a note and without the hesitation of an instant, with as much ease and fluency as he doubtless had rolled off the famous catalogue of the ships, in the second book of Homer's Iliad, with the text-book in his hand, as a college student or as Greek professor, half a century before!

I need hardly add that with this library, now our most valued treasure, the name of Mr. Everett will henceforth be hardly less identified than that of Mr. Dowse himself. Indeed, he had been associated with it long before it was so munificently transferred to us. By placing yonder portrait of him, taken in his earliest manhood, upon the walls of the humble apartment in which the books were originally collected, the only portrait ever admitted to their companionship, our worthy benefactor seems himself to have designated Edward Everett as the presiding genius or patron saint of this library; and as such he will be enshrined by us, and by all who shall succeed us, as long as the precious books and the not less precious canvas shall escape the ravages

of time.

I may not omit to remind you that our lamented friend-who was rarely without some labor of love for others in prospect had at least two matters in hand for us at the time of his death, which he was hoping, and which we all were hoping, that he would soon be able to complete. One of them was a memoir of that noble patriot of South Carolina, James Louis Petigru, whose life-long devotion to the cause of the American Union, alike in the days of nullification and of secession, will secure him the grateful remembrance of all to whom that Union is dear. The other was a volume of Washington's private letters, which he was preparing to publish in our current series of Historical Collections. It is hardly a month since he told me that the letters

were all copied, and that he was sorry to be obliged to postpone the printing of them a little longer, in order to find time for the annotations with which he desired to accompany them.

But you do not require to be told, gentlemen, that what Mr. Everett has done, or has proposed to do, specifically for our own Society, would constitute a very small part of all that he has accomplished in that cause of American history in which we are associated. It is true that he has composed no independent historical work, nor ever published any volume of biography more considerable than the excellent memoir of Washington, which he prepared, at the suggestion of his friend Lord Macaulay, for the new edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica." But there is no great epoch- there is hardly a single great event of our national or of our colonial history, which he has not carefully depicted and brilliantly illustrated in his occasional discourses. I have sometimes thought that no more attractive or more instructive history of our country could be presented to the youth of our land, than is found in the series of anniversary orations which he has delivered during the last forty years. Collect those orations into a volume by themselves; arrange them in their his torical order: "The First Settlement of New England," "The Settlement of Massachusetts," "The Battle of Bloody Brook in King Philip's War," "The Seven Years' War, the School of the Revolution," "The First Battles of the Revolutionary War," "The Battle of Lexington," "The Battle of Bunker Hill," "Dorchester in 1630, 1776, and 1855;" combine with them those "Anecdotes of Early Local History," which he prepared for our own Society; and add to them his charming discourses on "The Youth of Washington" and "The Character of Washington," on "The Boyhood and the Early Days of Franklin," and his memorable eulogies on Adams and Jefferson, on Lafayette, on John Quincy Adams and on Daniel Webster, and I know not in what other volume the young men, or even the old men, of our land could find the history of the glorious past more accurately or more admirably portrayed. I know not where they could find the toils and trials and struggles of our Colonial or Revolutionary fathers set forth with greater fulness of detail or greater felicity of illustration. As one reads those orations and discourses at

this moment, they might almost be regarded as successive chapters of a continuous and comprehensive work which had been composed and recited on our great national anniversaries, just as the chapters of Herodotus are said to have been recited at the Olympic festivals of ancient Greece.

Undoubtedly, however, it is rather as an actor and an orator in some of the later scenes of our country's history, than as an author, that Mr. Everett will be longest remembered. Indeed, since he first entered on the stage of mature life, there has hardly been a scene of any sort in that great historic drama, which of late, alas! has assumed the most terrible form of tragedy, in which he has not been called to play a more or less conspicuous part; and we all know how perfectly every part which has been assigned him has been performed. If we follow him from the hour when he left the University of Cambridge, with the highest academic honors, at an age when so many others are hardly prepared to enter there, down to the fatal day when he uttered those last impressive words at Faneuil Hall, we shall find him everywhere occupied with the highest duties, and everywhere discharging those duties with consummate ability and unwearied devotion. Varied and brilliant accomplishments, laborious research, copious diction, marvellous memory, magnificent rhetoric, a gracious presence, a glorious voice, an ardent patriotism controlling his public career, an unsullied purity crowning his private life, what element was there wanting in him for the complete embodiment of the classic orator, as Cato and Quinctilian so tersely and yet so comprehensively defined him eighteen hundred years ago," Vir bonus, dicendi peritus!"

But I may not occupy more of your time in these introductory remarks, intended only to exhibit our departed friend in his relations to our own Society, and to open the way for those who are prepared to do better justice to his general career and character. Let me only add that our Standing Committee have requested our associates, Mr. Hillard and Dr. Lothrop, to prepare some appropriate resolutions for the occasion, and that the Society is now ready to receive them.

42

THE FALL OF RICHMOND.

A SPEECH MADE AT FANEUIL HALL, BOSTON, APRIL 4, 1865.

I was greatly honored and obliged, Mr. Mayor, by the invitation I received last evening, from the City Council, to be present here this afternoon and participate in the proceedings of this meeting. Invited or uninvited, however, I could not have found it in my heart to be absent from Faneuil Hall at such a moment. But I felt when the committee called upon me, as I feel now, that I have no articulate speech adequate to such an occasion. Others around me may find it easy to give expression to the emotions which belong to the hour, and I can listen to them with admiration and with envy. But for myself, all the words I can command seem poor and powerless in presence of the great fact which has at length been announced to us by the electric wires. No single voice can do justice to that announcement. It is a moment for the combined voices, for the united cheers and huzzas of a whole people. It is a moment for grasping each other's hands with a fresh feeling of brotherhood and nationality. It is a moment for waving the old Union Flag with a renewed assurance that, by the blessing of God, it is to be the flag of the sons as it has been the flag of their Fathers. It is a moment for illuminations and fireworks, for drums and trumpets and salvos of artillery. It is a moment when one might almost be pardoned for adopting the somewhat inflated style of a certain King of Denmark in that great tragedy which has been recently rendered familiar to many of you, I doubt not, by the striking performance of a most accomplished American actor:

"Let the kettle to the trumpet speak, the trumpet to the cannoneer without, The cannon to the heavens, the heavens to earth."