Everett's fame as an orator was permanently established by his address on The Circumstances Favorable to the Progress of Literature in America, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1824. From that time to the time of his death he was recognized as the most polished of American orators, his speeches in power and purity of diction rivaling those of Demosthenes and Cicero. His most popular addresses were his historical orations at Plymouth, Concord, Charleston, Lexington, etc., and his eulogies on Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams. His oration on Washington is one of the most eloquent productions in the language. It was originally delivered in Boston, February 22, 1856, but the project of buying Mount Vernon by private subscription having originated, Everett delivered this celebrated oration in Richmond, Virginia, March 19, 1856, for the benefit of the Mount Vernon fund, and the address was repeated in different cities of the Union nearly one hundred and fifty times. The proceeds, which Mr. Everett generously contributed to the Mount Vernon fund, amounted to nearly one hundred thousand dollars. Everett was not only an orator and an author; he was also a statesman of the highest character. In 1824 he was elected to the House of Representatives, and remained a member until 1835, when he was for four successive years elected governor of Massachusetts. In 1839 he was defeated for the same position by one vote. In 1841 he was sent as minister to England, where both Oxford and Cambridge conferred on him the degree of D. C. L. On his return to America, in 1846, he was made President of Harvard College, which post he held for three years. In 1852, on the death of Webster, Everett was niade Secretary of State, and in the following year he was elected to the United States Senate, but illhealth compelled him to resign a year later. He was nominated also for the office of Vice-President of the United States in 1860, but was defeated. His most enduring works are his addresses, which were published in 1869 in four volumes, under the title, Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions. Besides these, Everett wrote The Dirge of Alaric the Visigoth, Santa Croce, and other poems. CRITICISM BY GEORGE S. HILLARD. THE variety of Mr. Everett's life and employments is but a type of the versatility of his powers and the wide range of his cultivation. . . . His style is rich and glowing, but always under the control of sound judgment and good taste. His learning and scholarship are never needlessly obtruded; they are woven into the web of his discourse, and are not embossed on its surface. He wrote under the inspiration of a generous and comprehensive patriotism, and his speeches are eminently suited to create and sustain a just and hightoned national sentiment. Whatever he did was done well; and his brilliant natural powers were, through life, trained and aided by those habits of vigorous industry which are falsely supposed by many to be found only in connection with dullness and mediocrity. THE MEMORY OF OUR HONORED DEAD, NOTE. The following extract, taken from his eulogy on Daniel Webster, admirably illustrates Everett's style. In every succeeding age, and in every country in which the fine arts have been cultivated, the respect and affec tion of survivors have found a pure and rational gratification in the historical portrait and the monumental Etatue of the honored and loved in private life, and 5 especially of the great and good who have deserved well of their country. Public esteem and confidence and private affection, the gratitude of the community, and the fond memories of the fireside, have ever sought in this way to prolong the sensible existence of their 10 beloved and respected objects. What though the dear and honored features and person on which, while living, we never gazed without tenderness or veneration, have been taken from us, something of the loveliness, something of the majesty, abides in the portrait, the bust, 15 and the statue. The heart bereft of the living originals turns to them; and, cold and silent as they are, they strengther and animate the cherished recollections of the loved, the honored, and the lost. The skill of the painter and sculptor, which thus 20 comes in aid of the memory and imagination, is, in its highest degree, one of the rarest, as it is one of the most exquisite, accomplishments within our attainment, and in its perfection as seldom witnessed as the perfection of speech or of music. The plastic hand must be 25 moved by the same ethereal instinct as the eloquent lips or the recording pen. The number of those who, in the language of Michael Angelo, can discern the finished. statue in the heart of the shapeless block, and bid it start into artistic life-who are endowed with the ex- 30 quisite gift of moulding the rigid bronze or the lifeless marble into graceful, majestic, and expressive forms—is not greater than the number of those who are able with equal majesty, grace, and expressiveness to make the spiritual essence, the finest shades of thought and feel- 35 ing, sensible to the mind through the eye and the ear in the mysterious embodiment of the written and the spoken word. If Athens in her palmiest days had but one Pericles, she had also but one Phidias. Nor are these beautiful and noble arts, by which the 40 face and the form of the departed are preserved to us-calling into the highest exercise, as they do, all the imitative and idealizing powers of the painter and the sculptor-the least instructive of our teachers. The portraits and the statues of the honored dead kindle the 45 generous ambition of the youthful aspirants to fame. Themistocles could not sleep for the trophies in the Ceramicus; and when the living Demosthenes had ceased to speak, the stony lips remained to rebuke and exhort his degenerate countrymen. More than a hun- 50 dred years have elapsed since the great Newton passed away, but from age to age his statue by Roubillac, in the ante-chapel of Trinity College, will give distinctness to the conceptions formed of him by hundreds and thousands of ardent youthful spirits, filled with reverence for 55 that transcendent intellect which, from the phenomena that fall within our limited vision, deduced the imperial law by which the Sovereign Mind rules the entire universe. We can never look on the person of Washington, but his serene and noble countenance, perpetuated 60 by the pencil and the chisel, is familiar to far greater multitudes than ever stood in his living presence, and will be thus familiar to the latest generation. What parent, as he conducts his son to Mount Auburn or to Bunker Hill, will not, as he passes before their 65 monumental statues, seek to heighten his reverence for virtue, for patriotism, for science, for learning, for devotion to the public good, as he bids him contemplate the form of that grave and venerable Winthrop who left his pleasant home in England to come and found a new re- 70 public in this untrodden wilderness; of that ardent and intrepid Otis who first struck out the spark of American independence; of that noble Adams, its most eloquent champion on the floor of Congress; of that martyr, Warren, who laid down his life in its defence; of that self- 75 taught Bowditch, who, without a guide, threaded the starry mazes of the heavens; of that Story, honored at home and abroad as one of the brightest luminaries of the law, and, by a felicity of which I believe there is no other example, admirably portrayed in marble by his 80 son? What citizen of Boston, as he accompanies the stranger around our streets-guiding him through our busy thoroughfares, to our wharves crowded with vessels which range every sea and gather the produce of every 85 climate, up to the dome of this capitol, which commands as lovely a landscape as can delight the eye or gladden the heart-will not, as he calls his attention at last to the statues of Franklin and Webster, exclaim, "Boston takes pride in her natural position, she rejoices 90 in her beautiful environs, she is grateful for her material prosperity; but, richer than the merchandise stored in palatial warehouses, greener than the slopes of seagirt islets, lovelier than this encircling panorama of land and sea, of field and hamlet, of lake and stream, of garden 95 and grove, is the memory of her sons, native and adopted -the character, services, and fame of those who have benefited and adorned their day and generation. Our children and the schools at which they are trained, our citizens and the services they have rendered, these are 100 our jewels, these our abiding treasures." Yes, your long rows of quarried granite may crumble to the dust; the corn-fields in yonder villages, ripening to the sickle, may, like the plains of stricken Lombardy a few weeks ago, be kneaded into bloody clods by the 105 madding wheels of artillery; this populous city, like the old cities of Etruria and Campagna Romagna, may |