the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service, with an upright zeal, that the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.

Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love towards it, which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat, in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws, under a free government; the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

THE CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON.

To the historian few characters appear so little to have shared the common frailties and imperfections of human nature as that of Washington. There are but few particulars that can be mentioned even to his disadvantage. Instances may be found where, perhaps, it may be thought that he was decisive to a degree that partook of severity and harshness, or even more; but how innumerable were the decisions which he had to make!-how difficult and how important, through the eventful series of twenty years of command in the cabinet or the field!

Let it be considered what it is to have the management of a revolution, and afterwards the maintenance of order. Where is the man who, in the history of our race, has ever succeeded in attempting successively the one and the other?—not on a small scale, a petty state in Italy, or among a horde of barbarians, but in an enlightened age, when it is not easy for one man to rise superior to another, and in the eyes of mankind,—

"A kingdom for a stage,

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene."

The plaudits of his country were continually sounding in his ears; and neither the judgment nor the virtues of the man were ever disturbed. Armies were led to the field with all the enterprise of a hero, and then dismissed with all the equanimity of a philosopher. Power was accepted, was exercised, was resigned, precisely at the moment and in the way that duty and patriotism directed. Whatever was the difficulty, the trial, the temptation, or the danger, there stood the soldier and the citizen, eternally the same, without fear and without reproach, and there was the man who was not only at all times virtuous, but at all times wise.

The merit of Washington by no means ceases with his campaigns; it becomes, after the peace of 1783, even more striking than before; for the same man who, for the sake of liberty, was ardent enough to resist the power of Great Britain, and hazard everything on this side the grave, at a later period had to be temperate enough to resist the same spirit of liberty, when it was mistaking its proper objects and transgressing its appointed limits.

The American revolution was to approach him, and he was to kindle in the general flame: the French revolution was to reach him, and to consume but too many of his countrymen; and his "own ethereal mould, incapable of stain, was to purge off the baser fire victorious." But all this was done: he might have been pardoned though he had failed amid the enthusiasm of those around him, and when liberty was the delusion; but the foundations of the moral world were shaken, and not the understanding of Washington.

As a ruler of mankind, he may be proposed as a model. Deeply impressed with the original rights of human nature, he never forgot that the end, and meaning, and aim of all just government was the happiness of the people; and he never exercised authority till he had first taken care to put himself clearly in the right. His candor, his patience, his love of justice, were unexampled; and this, though naturally he was not patient,— much otherwise,-highly irritable.

He therefore deliberated well, and placed his subject in every point of view, before he decided; and, his understanding being correct, he was thus rendered, by the nature of his faculties, his

strength of mind, and his principles, the man, of all others, to whom the interests of his fellow-creatures might, with most confidence, be intrusted; that is, he was the first of the rulers of mankind.

WILLIAM SMYTH.

THE MEMORY OF WASHINGTON.

To us, citizens of America, it belongs above all others to show respect to the memory of Washington, by the practical deference which we pay to those sober maxims of public policy which he has left us,-a last testament of affection in his Farewell Address. Of all the exhortations which it contains, I scarce need to say to you that none are so emphatically uttered, none so anxiously repeated, as those which enjoin the preservation of the Union of these States.

On this, under Providence, it depends in the judgment of Washington whether the people of America shall follow the Old World example, and be broken up into a group of independent military powers, wasted by eternal border wars, feeding the ambition of petty sovereigns on the life-blood of wasted principalities,—a custom-house on the bank of every river, a fortress on every frontier hill, a pirate lurking in the recesses of every bay,—or whether they shall continue to constitute a federal republic, the most extensive, the most powerful, the most prosperous in the long line of ages. No one can read the Farewell Address without feeling that this was the thought and this the care which lay nearest and heaviest upon that noble heart; and if--which heaven forbid―the day shall ever arrive when his parting counsels on that head shall be forgotten, on that day, come it soon or come it late, it may as mournfully as truly be said that Washington has lived in vain. Then the vessels as they ascend and descend the Potomac may toll their bells with new significance as they pass Mount Vernon; they will strike the requiem of constitutional liberty for us,-for all nations.

But it cannot, shall not be; this great woe to our beloved

country, this catastrophe for the cause of national freedom, this grievous calamity for the whole civilized world, it cannot, shall not be. No, by the glorious 19th of April, 1775; no, by the precious blood of Bunker Hill, of Princeton, of Saratoga, of King's Mountain, of Yorktown; no, by the undying spirit of '76; no, by the sacred dust enshrined at Mount Vernon; no, by the dear immortal memory of Washington,-that sorrow and shame shall never be.

A great and venerated character like that of Washington, which commands the respect of an entire population, however divided on other questions, is not an isolated fact in history to be regarded with barren admiration,-it is a dispensation of Providence for good. It was well said by Mr. Jefferson, in 1792, writing to Washington to dissuade him from declining a renomination, "North and South will hang together while they have you to hang to." Washington in the flesh is taken from us; we shall never behold him as our fathers did; but his memory remains, and I say, let us hang to his memory. Let us make a national festival and holiday of his birthday; and ever, as the 22d of February returns, let us remember that, while with these solemn and joyous rites of observance we celebrate the great anniversary, our fellow-citizens on the Hudson, on the Potomac, from the Southern plains to the Western lakes, are engaged in the same offices of gratitude and love.

Nor we, nor they alone;-beyond the Ohio, beyond the Mississippi, along that stupendous trail of immigration from East to West, which, bursting into States as it moves westward, is already threading the Western prairies, swarming through the portals of the Rocky Mountains and winding down their slopes, the name and the memory of Washington on that gracious night will travel with the silver queen of heaven through sixty degrees of longitude, nor part company with her till she walks in her brightness through the Golden Gate of California, and passes serenely on to hold midnight court with her Australian stars. There and there only, in barbarous archipelagoes, as yet untrodden by civilized man, the name of Washington is unknown, and there, too, when they swarm with enlightened millions, new honors shall be paid with ours to his memory.

EDWARD EVERETT.

THE GLORY OF WASHINGTON.

How grateful the relief which the friend of mankind, the lover of virtue, experiences when, turning from the contemplation of such a character as Napoleon, his eye rests upon the greatest man of our own or any age,—the only one upon whom an epithet, so thoughtlessly lavished by men, to foster the crimes of their worst enemies, may be innocently and justly bestowed! This eminent person is presented to our observation clothed in attributes as modest, as unpretending, as little calculated to strike or to astonish, as if he had passed unknown through some secluded region of private life. But he had a judgment sure and sound; a steadiness of mind which never suffered any passion, or even any feeling, to ruffle its calm; a strength of understanding which worked rather than forced its way through all obstacles, removing, or avoiding, rather than overleaping them. If these things, joined to the most absolute self-denial, the most habitual and exclusive devotion to principle, can constitute a great character, without either quickness of apprehension, remarkable resources of information, or inventive powers, or any brilliant quality that might dazzle the vulgar,-then surely Washington was the greatest man that ever lived in this world, uninspired by divine wisdom and unsustained by supernatural virtue. His courage, whether in battle or in council, was as perfect as might be expected from this pure and steady temper of soul. A perfectly just man, with a thoroughly firm resolution never to be misled by others, any more than to be by others overawed; never to be seduced or betrayed, or hurried away by his own weaknesses or self-delusions, any more than by other men's arts; nor ever to be disheartened by the most complicated difficulties, any more than to be spoilt on the giddy heights of fortune;-such was this great man.

Great he was, pre-eminently great, whether we regard him sustaining, alone, the whole weight of campaigns all but desperate, or gloriously terminating a just warfare by his resources and his courage; presiding over the jarring elements of his political council, alike deaf to the storms of all extremes, or directing the formation of a new government for a great people, the first time that so vast an experiment had ever been tried by