A MAN of fine rather than strong qualities, EVERETT was an excellent type of the intellectual culture that in New England, and especially Massachusetts, succeeded the vigorous Revolutionary energy of the Puritan element. He was an accomplished gentleman, scholar, and rhetorican. His early ministrations in a Boston church were greatly admired; his Greek professorship and later presidency at Harvard were eminently satisfactory; his service in the House of Representatives and in the United States Senate was both useful and elegant; his ambassadorship to England reflected credit upon his country and greatly interested many of the foremost British statesmen and men of letters; his governorship of Massachusetts was all that it should be; as President Fillmore's Secretary of State, in 1852, amidst the turmoil of domestic political conflict he serenely guided the nation's foreign affairs. In all the official stations with which he was honored, he satisfactorily fulfilled his duties. EVERETT'S prime gift, however, was oratory. It was not "the power of speech to move men's blood," but the historic research, the admirable grouping and presentation of events and their consequences, the felicity of illustration, the harmony of language, the music of voice, the grace of pose and gesture, that made EVERETT a favorite orator on all specific оссаsions." His oration on "Washington" he repeated about a hundred and fifty times, the pecuniary returns, enlarged by payments for periodical writings to $100,000, being given towards the purchase of Mount Vernon as a national property. His discourse on "The History of Liberty" (at Charlestown, Massachusetts, July 4, 1828), here given, is one of his char acteristic deliverances. But the difference between his elegancies and the direc speech of more practical men is well shown in what he himself wrote to President LINCOLN the day after they had both made addresses at the Gettysburg Dedication: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY THE event which we commemorate is all-important, not merely in our own annals, but in those of the world. The sententious English poet has declared that "the proper study of mankind is man," and of all inquiries of a temporal nature, the history of our fellow-beings is unquestionably among the most interesting. But not all the chapters of human history are alike important. The annals of our race have been filled up with incidents which concern not, or at least ought not to concern, the great company of mankind. History, as it has often been written, is the genealogy of princes, the field-book of conquerors; and the fortunes of our fellow-men have been treated only so far as they have been affected by the influence of the great masters and destroyers of our race. Such history is, I will not say a worthless study, for it is necessary for us to know the dark side as well as the bright side of our condition. But it is a melancholy study which fills the bosom of the philanthropist and the friend of liberty with sorrow. But the history of liberty- the history of men struggling to be free - the history of men who have acquired and are exercising their freedom - the history of those great movements in the world, by which liberty has been established and perpetuated, forms a subject which we cannot contemplate too closely. This is the real history of man, of the human family, of rational immortal beings. We hear much at school of the liberty of Greece and Romea great and complicated subject, which this is not the occasion to attempt to disentangle. True it is that we find, in the annals of both these nations, bright examples of public virtue the record of faithful friends of their country of strenuous foes of oppression at home or abroad and admirable precedents of popular strength. But we nowhere find in them the account of a populous and extensive region, blessed with institutions securing the enjoyment and transmission of regulated liberty. In freedom, as in most other things, the ancient nations, while they made surprisingly close approaches to the truth, yet, for want of some one great and essential principle or instrument, they came utterly short of it in practice. They had profound and elegant scholars; but, for want of the art of printing, they could not send information out among the people, where alone it is of great use in reference to human happiness. Some of them ventured boldly out to sea, and possessed an aptitude for foreign commerce; yet, for want of the mariner's compass, they could not navigate distant seas, but crept for ages along the shores of the Mediterranean. In respect to freedom, they established popular governments in single cities; but, for want of the representative principle, they could not extend these institutions over a large and populous country. But as a large and populous country, generally speaking, can alone possess strength enough for self-defense, this want was fatal. The freest of their cities accordingly fell a prey, sooner or later, either to a foreign invader or to domestic traitors. In this way, liberty made no firm progress in the ancient states. It was a speculation of the philosopher, and an experiment of the patriot, but not an established state of society. The patriots of Greece and Rome had indeed succeeded in enlightening the public mind on one of the cardinal points of freedom - the necessity of an elected executive. The name and the office of a king were long esteemed not only something to be rejected, but something rude and uncivilized, belonging to savage nations, ignorant of the rights of man, as understood in cultivated states. The [Roman] empire began and continued a pure military despotism, ingrafted, by a sort of permanent usurpation, on the forms and names of the ancient republic. The spirit, indeed, of liberty had long since ceased. to animate these ancient forms, and when the barbarous tribes of Central Asia and Northern Europe burst into the Roman empire, they swept away the |