History is not without her examples of hard-fought fields, where the banner of liberty has floated triumphantly on the wildest storm of battle. She is without her examples of a people by whom the dear-bought treasure has been wisely employed and safely handed down. The eyes of the world are turned for that example to us. It is related by an ancient historian,* of that Brutus who slew Cæsar, that he threw himself on his sword, after the disastrous battle of Philippi; with the bitter exclamation, that he had followed virtue as a substance, but found it a name. It is not too much to say, that there are, at this moment, noble spirits in the elder world, who are anxiously watching the practical operation of our institutions, to learn whether liberty, as they have been told, is a mockery, a pretence, and a curse, or a blessing, for which it becomes them to brave the scaffold and the cimeter.

Let us then, as we assemble on the birthday of the nation, as we gather upon the green turf, once wet with precious blood, let us devote ourselves to the sacred cause of CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY. Let us abjure the interests and passions which divide the great family of American freemen. Let the rage of party spirit sleep to-day. Let us resolve that our children shall have cause to bless the memory of their fathers, as we have cause to bless the memory of ours.

Dio Cassius, Lib. XLVII. in fin.

MONUMENT TO HARVARD.*

WE are assembled, fellow-students and fellow-citizens, to witness the erection of a simple monument to the memory of John Harvard. It is known to you all, with what ready forethought our Pilgrim fathers provided for the education of those who should come after them. Six years only had elapsed, from the time that Governor Winthrop, with the charter of the colony, landed on the banks of Mystic River, when the General Court appropriated four hundred pounds, out of the scanty resources at its command, for the erection of a school or college at Cambridge, then called Newtown.† The views of our worthy fathers, at that time, probably did not extend beyond the establishment of a grammar school.

But that Providence, which on so many other occasions watched over the infancy of America, and gave the right direction to its first beginnings, was vigilant here. In the year 1637, (the year following that in which the school at Newtown was established,) the Rev. John Harvard arrived in the colony. As he was admitted a freeman in November, 1637, it is supposed that he came over in the autumn of that year.

This ever-memorable benefactor of learning and religion in America, had been educated at the university of Cambridge in England, was a master of arts of Emmanuel College in that university, and afterwards a minister of the gospel. But in what part of England, or in what year he was born;

Address delivered at the erection of a monument to John Harvard, in the graveyard at Charlestown, on the 26th of September, 1828. See note A, at the end.

leaving his native land, are We are not without hopes,

where he was settled in the ministry; and what were the circumstances of his life, before matters as yet unknown to us. that in answer to inquiries addressed to the college in England where our founder was educated, we may yet derive some information on these interesting points.*

The scanty notices which our early histories contain of him, lead us to suppose that he brought to this country the disease which soon proved fatal to him. He engaged, however, in the duties of his profession, and was employed as a preacher in the church in this place. But his usefulness in that calling was destined to a short duration. He died on the fourteenth of September of the year following his arrival, corresponding, in the new style, to the twenty-fourth of September; performing in his last act a work of liberality, destined, we trust, to stand while America shall endure, and with a usefulness as wide as its limits.

By his last will, he bequeathed to the colony, for the endowment of the school at Newtown, one moiety of his estate, amounting to a sum little short of eight hundred pounds; a bequest which, even in the present prosperous state of the country, would be thought liberal, and which, in its condition at that time, may truly be called munificent.

This donation gave an instantaneous impulse to the projected establishment. It was determined, by the court, to erect the school into a college. In filial commemoration of the place where several of our fathers had been educated, the name of Newtown was changed to that of Cambridge; and the college itself was called by that of Harvard.

And thus did our worthy founder become the instrument in the hand of Providence of effecting the design which the pious leaders of the colony had most at heart. Such he was felt to be by his contemporaries. In a letter written by some of them, in 1642, they say, "After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for

* See note B, at the end.

God's worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers should lie in the dust. And as we were thinking and consulting how to effect this great work, it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr Harvard (a godly gentleman and lover of learning, then living amongst us) to give the one half of his estate towards the erecting of a college, and all his library."*

The college instantly went into operation, on the footing of the ancient institutions of Europe; and in 1642, four years only after the decease of Harvard, sent forth its first class of graduates; men who rose to eminence in the ministry of the gospel, in the legal profession, and in the public service, both at home and abroad. One of the first class graduated at Cambridge was sent, both by Cromwell and Charles II., as minister to the States General of Holland. One became a fellow of a college at Oxford; two received degrees of medicine at Leyden and Padua; one received a degree of divinity at Dublin; and on one was conferred the degree of doctor of divinity at Oxford, then, as now, the greatest academical distinction to which an English theologian can attain. Nor was it without example that young men were sent from England to receive their education at Harvard College, within a few years after its foundation.

With such energy and spirit did our alma mater spring into being; and so decisive is the evidence, that, even in that first stage of the existence of the college, it furnished an education adequate to every department of the civil or sacred service of the country, and not inferior to that of the distinguished schools in Europe.

But it would belong rather to a history of the college than to a eulogy on its founder, to pursue this narrative. I will

* New England's First Fruits. Mass. Hist. Coll. I. p. 202. First Series. See note C, at the end.

Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence. Series. VII. 29.

Mass. Hist. Coll. New

only add, that, till about the end of the seventeenth century, it remained the only college in America; and, consequently, up to that period, almost the only source of liberal education accessible on this side of the Atlantic.

It is, then, fellow-students, one hundred and ninety years, this day, since the death of the man who was recognized by his contemporaries as the founder of the most ancient seminary of learning in the country, the college where we received our education. In paying these honors to his single name, we do no injustice to other liberal benefactors of earlier or later times. It is a part of the merit of those who go forward in works of public usefulness and liberality, that they construct a basis on which others of kindred temper, who come after them, may build; and awaken a spirit which may lead to services still more important than their own.

But, considering the penury of the colony, the exhaustion of its first settlers, and the extreme difficulty which must, in consequence, have attended the foundation of a college, it is not easy to estimate the full importance of the early and liberal benefactions of the man whom we commemorate. But for his generosity, the people might have been depressed for the want of that hope which they built on such an institution, and from the fear of an uneducated posterity; and society might so far have yielded to the various causes of degeneracy incident to a remote and feeble colony, as never afterwards to have felt the importance of learning, nor made provision for the education of the people — a result, we may safely say, which would have been fatal to the character of this community.

But it was otherwise ordered for our welfare. A generous spirit was guided to our shores, for no other purpose, as it would seem, but to dispense the means requisite for the foundation of a college. Less than two hundred years have elapsed, and not much less than six thousand names are borne on the catalogue of the institution, whose venerable walls are, indeed, a noble monument to their founder. There is a tradition, that, till the revolutionary war, a gravestone was standing within this enclosure, over the spot where his ashes

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