other men, which he had brought under mastery only by the most resolute and persevering self-discipline,—that he had fought and won in a more arduous conflict than that of the battle-field, in the warfare and victory within his own soul. In his case, however, there can be no excess of eulogy; only we would prefer a life-like picture of the greatest and best man of his age to a drawing out of line of a non-human nondescript.

But it may be questioned whether there has not been an exaggerated laudation in the case of some of his distinguished fellow soldiers and patriots. Hamilton's services to the country have not been overrated; but as to his personal character he owes much of his posthumous reputation to his good fortune in being slain by a worse man than himself, who yet would not have had the opportunity of killing him, had the two men not been too nearly on the same moral plane to exempt Hamilton from the insult of a challenge or to permit him to refuse it on the ground of principle. As for Burr, whose name certainly deserves enduring ignominy, there is no vice attached to his memory, debauchee and duellist as he already was, which did not equally stain his character when he received the same number of votes with Jefferson for the Presidency of the United States, and when in the House of Representatives he received eleven out of twelve Massachusetts votes. As for his subsequent treason (so-called), I doubt whether it can be proved to be different in kind from the certainly extralegal enterprises which issued in the annexation of Texas, received the sanction of the government, and were defended by the war with Mexico. Burr was doomed to exceptional infamy, because, being a very bad man, he had sold himself to and had been sold by both political parties, and thus had neither to whitewash him or to apologize for him.

The mention of Hamilton and Burr reminds me of the difficulty in the way of authentic history growing out of strong party animosity. No attempt is made to write a

permanent history of events as they pass; but contemporary documents furnish the materials on which the future historian must rely, and those documents may be mere travesties of facts and gross caricatures of persons. Thus the more honest and impartial the historian, the less worthy of confidence his history may be. The authorities for a portion of the early history of our country after the adoption of the Constitution are, for the most part, newspapers compared with which the vilest journals of our day are clean and pure, and pamphlets of which it is hard to say whether virulence or vulgarity is the predominant characteristic. The men whom we have most admired are placed before us in a garb in which we cannot recognize them; and had they been what they are made to appear, our government would have collapsed and perished for lack of men fit to administer it, in the life-time of the generation that witnessed its birth. A vessel heaped with filth from one of the city sewers would be as fair a representation of the soil of Worcester as these documents give of American life and character at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century. Meanwhile, the actual history of the Federalist party, which, whatever may have been its errors, had in it more of public virtue and of private worth than any party that has succeeded it, remains unwritten, while those who remember its latter days and its great men who survived it are fast passing away.

It may be doubted whether a perfectly fair history of our great Rebellion will ever be written. From the South we can not expect it. But what Northern historian will dare to tell, as it ought to be told, the shameful story of the sycophancy of Northern statesmen which by base compromises and concessions nursed the slave-power into its capacity of rebellion? Nor yet shall we want posterity to know that, notwithstanding the patently adverse meaning of the Constitution, the right of secession was claimed by

our best and most patriotic men during the last war with Great Britain, that even as late as the admission of Texas it was not regarded with disfavor, and that at all Southern seminaries of learning the prior claim of the state over the nation to the allegiance of its citizens had been still inculcated as incontrovertibly sound doctrine. These considerations do not, indeed, absolve the leaders of the Rebellion of their manifold truculence and treachery; but they do exculpate the multitudes of peaceable and well-meaning citizens, and even the officers in the army and navy, who, when on the actual secession of a State the conflict of allegiance arose, did what they had always been taught to regard as their duty even more than their right. Instances of this kind within our own familiar knowledge may well lead us to question the authenticity of portions of earlier history that belong to periods of civil strife, whether of words or of arms. The very conditions of such times can hardly have failed in a greater or less degree to corrupt the original sources from which historians have been compelled to draw.

If there be truth in what has been said, there is at best only limited and approximate truth in what calls itself history. But let me say, and it will be my last topic in a paper already long enough, the most authentic and instructive form of history is biography, -the journals or autobiography of men too wise to deceive themselves and too honest to deceive others, and lives of distinguished or representative men written by competent and dispassionate biographers. A man who holds in his time and community a foremost place so enters into relation with all the phases of society and of public life, is brought into intercourse with so many persons, is so affected by passing events, or so aids in bringing them to pass, that a sketch of him is a negative of his surroundings, from which they may be photographed with the nearest approach to accuracy. Then too, such a man is made by antecedent history, and helps

to make subsequent history, so that the photograph reaches in both directions beyond his lifetime. Thus Plutarch's Lives are the best ancient histories that we have, because, instead of chronicling events, they show us what we are most concerned to know,-man in history, how history made men, how men made history. We have, especially under the authorship and editorship of Mr. Sparks, a not dissimilar service performed for American history; for not only in his Washington and Franklin, but in the numerous memoirs, prepared under his direction, of lesser, yet important and influential men in various departments of life, we have more exact and realizable views of society and of events than the best formal history can possibly give us. In this respect our mother country is preeminently rich, and I do not know an epoch or section of English history which I cannot read the most instructively in the lives of those who bore part in it; while such series as Campbell's Chief Justices, or Hook's Archbishops of Canterbury—both of these, indeed, needing large allowance for the personal equation might almost take the place of works purporting

to be continuous history.

As a familiar instance of the relation which biography bears to history, I might again refer to that marvellous autobiography, Sewall's Diary. This for the time that it covers is almost a history of Massachusetts, and it gives some realistic and instructive pictures, the like of which we can find nowhere else. When we learn that, though he was, perhaps, the richest man in Boston, his ink froze in his wife's room while he was writing; when we find that, not for pleasure, but for business, the water-passage between Boston and Cambridge was often resorted to, and are told of instances when the vessel, with reverend and honored freight, was cast away on this passage under circumstances of imminent peril, we can imagine how hard life was in New England a century and a half ago,of how little worth in point of comfort and enjoyment this

earthly existence must have seemed; and we are better able to account for and to excuse the indifference to life manifested in the sanguinary laws of our fathers, and in modes of thought, feeling and action in accordance with these laws.

At this point I was intending to close my report by an illustration of the wealth of materials which a single biography may furnish for general history, in the case of a biography which I believe to be in existence, and which I supposed to be in print till I sought for it in vain in our libraries, that of a former member of this society, whom I recollect as having seen in my early boyhood, Rev. Manasseh Cutler. The son of a New England farmer, first a lawyer, engaged for a time in the whale fishery, chaplain in the army of the Revolution; an honorary member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and as such, assisting in post mortem examinations conducted by some of the most distinguished members of the faculty; the earliest of American botanists, making some important and permanent additions to the pharmacopoeia in the department of medical botany, and utilizing the silk of the common Asclepias or silk-weed in ways which would not have fallen out of use but for the increased production of cotton; reading before the American Academy papers on transits and eclipses, and furnishing for that body minute and carefully tabulated meteorological observations; lobbying with the Continental Congress for the Ohio grant, and superintending its settlement in person; a member of the Congress of the United States for two successive terms in the earlier years of the present century; for more than half a century exercising the functions and practising the generous hospitality of a country clergyman; intimate with men in public office and with men of science from Franklin downward; always, even in old age, in advance of his time, keeping, too, a journal covering, I think, nearly his whole life, certainly its most important. portions, -he came into contact with almost