and truly stop chewing and smoking tobacco while he was a commissioner, or postponed the sacrifice until he became Minister Plenipotentiary? I still have my doubts on the subject. But no one should undertake the management of such a theme as your great convention, without a long notice, and without a deliberate design to do full justice to the subject.

If I seem to lay too great a stress upon this topic of the lives of men, it is because I am convinced that one of the chief elements of patriotism is the household growth of the names and deeds of their great and good men in the hearts of a people. This, more than any thing else, constitutes the homogeneity of a commonwealth. The tide of change and time and foreign blood is perpetually breaking away the continuity between the past and the present; and we are in constant danger of becoming an utterly new people, a bastard people, a people that know not father or mother, that saddest and most dangerous of things, a people without a past. Now, the affections, if I may so speak, are practical; and, to be in earnest, must fix upon persons, rather than things. We think more tenderly and lovingly of a good deed, and so of the doer, than we think of a mountain, or a plain, or a stream, or a bit of paper, write on it what you will. Thus flesh and blood, though long reduced to dust, become reinvested with life, and are made our contemporary and friend and counsellor, and, far more than inanimate nature, kindle our love, quicken our aspirations, and tend to keep the great family, past and present, of the State one and the same. Moreover, we are told by a high authority, that men who do not celebrate the worth of those who preceded them, are not apt to leave any thing behind them worthy of remembrance; and I recall to your recollection the sentiment of Tacitus, which I am fond of repeating-contemptu famæ contemni virtutes,· that we do despite to Virtue herself, when we fail to keep alive the memory of those whom she has crowned with honor.

On my return from Massachusetts in 1867, I was frequently asked what struck me most of all that I saw. The field of observation was vast indeed. I observed the wonderful increase of your city in the interval of forty years, of Cambridge, and of the neighboring towns; your public schools with their twenty or thirty thousand pupils; your college with its new halls and overflowing libraries, borrowing fresh youth from the centuries; your private and public structures; the Dowse Library and the Winthrop manuscript; your many valuable institutions, your munificent endowments; your intellectual men and brilliant women and sweet children; the dust of your illustrious dead, reposing amid the

smoke and strife of the city, or beneath the fragrant airs of Mount Auburn; your unequalled and endless succession of rural villas, which looked as if your whole land was keeping holiday; and many other things; and I was' chastened and delighted with them all. Yet there were two things, which, in such a harvest of life and art, were almost insignificant, but which touched me most of all. The first was the large number of lads and lasses in common apparel, who were ranged on the benches in the Public Library, quietly awaiting their time to be served with fresh books in place of those that had been returned; a moral spectacle, which, as my mind ran over its innumerable antecedents and consequents, affected me almost to tears. And the other thing was the marble statue of James Otis in the chapel of Mount Auburn. I was struck by it just as Benjamin West was struck by the first sight of the Apollo Belvidere. I was surprised and delighted to see and know that the spirit of the great patriot orator of the North was enshrined in so God-like a form. I shall never forget my indebtedness to the kind friend who showed me two such sights. I had never heard of the statue of Otis. He was my darling character of the more modern colonial New England, as John Winthrop was of the earlier time. He stands with us of the South in inseparable union with Patrick Henry. Then his afflictions and timely death placed him, like his compatriot, Josiah Quincy, Jr., by a peculiar and fortunate canonization, beyond the atmosphere of faction, and preserved his lustre undefiled by the passion and the dirt of later times. The beauty of his daily life; his literary accomplishments, which enabled him, not merely to draw some vague meaning from a Latin or Greek composition, which is too often the bound of the knowledge of many modern lawyers, but to enter into all the worth of its structure, and to relish the minutest graces of its rhythm,- an art he taught others to acquire in his tract on prosody; his splendid powers of argumentation, his vivid eloquence; his moral heroism ever so conspicuous, his patriotism ever so pure; the treatment of his person on that disastrous day so revolting, and his magnanimity in forgiving it all so majestic; that cloud that came over his lordly intellect when in full blaze and shut him out from communion with his kind; that memorable death, coming just as his country's independence was achieved and assured and soon to be acknowledged by the parent-land, and summoning him instantly away, as it were, by a special messenger from the Most High, all these attributes and qualities, which would have imparted dignity to the humblest figure, embodied in the noblest, appealed with resistless force to my heart. As I gazed upon that statue, I strained

my ear and my memory to catch the tones of some patriotic harp that had hymned its praises, either in the bowers of the University which claimed the original as one of its brightest jewels, and in the presence of scholars and divines and statesmen, and those merchantprinces who so frequently take their coursers from the car of commerce and hitch them to the car of philosophy, or in the retirement of the closet, or in its own hallowed temple; but I strove in vain. The Muse of Song, if she ever deigned to pause in the presence of one of her most skilful worshippers, passed in silence by; and ever since that day I have watched the footsteps of Dr. Holmes and Mr. Longfellow more closely than ever. All know the genius of those two eminent associates of yours, and their glowing patriotism which has sparkled on many a brilliant occasion, and who, in their connection with you, handsomely and happily do homage to History, as one of the Sacred Nine; and I have an inward and cheering assurance that, though the statue itself may perish by time, or fire, or force, or, like our own Washington, be lifted from its pedestal and borne away by the invader, posterity, in common with the present generation, will behold the reflection of the image of New England's most illustrious patriot-orator of the era of the Revolution, in the immortal verse of at least two of her greatest poets. How blessed and enrapturing is the influence of true poetry! It embalms and popularizes the sublimest forms of sculpture and art. Even the Apollo has gathered new immortality from Childe Harold; and I never think of the Prescott Swords, but the pleasing strains of Dr. Frothingham come over

me.

With an expression of renewed regret that I cannot be with you, and with the highest respect for the members of the Society,

I am, as ever, truly yours,

To the Hon. ROBERT C. WINTHROP,
Boston, Mass.

HUGH BLAIR GRIGSBY.

The President recurred to the subject of the approaching expiration of the lease of that part of the Society's building now occupied by the Savings-Bank, and thought the Society should soon take some steps toward an alteration in the building, both for a future tenant and for the Society's accommodation. Whereupon it was

Voted, To refer this whole subject to the Standing Committee, with full power.

The necessity of soon applying to the Legislature for leave to hold more real and personal property than the present charter allows, and of enlarging the number of our members, was again alluded to by the President, and it was

Voted, To refer the subject last named to a committee, consisting of Messrs. Clifford, Ellis, Gray, Deane, and Davis, to consider the subject, and report to the Society.

Mr. PARKMAN, who had recently returned from a visit to Europe, alluded to some papers of considerable value which he had seen in possession of the Marquis of Montcalm in Paris; and particularly to one letter of some historical significance, supposed to have been written by General Montcalm, who fell at Quebec. Mr. Parkman's remarks were substantially as follows:

During the last spring I had a number of interviews with the Marquis of Montcalm at Paris. He informed me that he had in his possession among his family papers the correspondence of his ancestor, General Montcalm, with his relatives in France during the last French war in America. He allowed me to examine these papers and have copies of them made. They proved to be of great interest and value, consisting of forty-nine letters, some of them very long, from Montcalm to his mother and sister, besides a considerable number of other letters written by persons in immediate connection with Montcalm in America. I caused the whole of them to be copied.

Among these papers was the remarkable letter written by Montcalm a short time before his death, in which he prophesies that the fall of Canada will eventually occasion the revolt of the British Colonies. This letter, together with several others purporting to be written by Montcalm, was published in London by J. Almon during the Revolutionary war.* Its

* The letter to which special reference is here made purports to have been written by General Montcalm to M. de Molé, from Quebec, Aug. 24, 1759. This was three weeks

authenticity was, it seems, called in question at the time, anu has ever since remained in doubt. In course of conversation with the marquis,- before he had shown me the papers, he remarked that the personal and military qualities of his ancestor were tolerably well known; but that he had one quality which was not sufficiently recognized, and this was his political foresight, which was proved, he added, by one of his letters in which he made a remarkable prophecy concerning the American Revolution. I told him I knew the letter to which he alluded, as it had been published in England in a small volume. He expressed great surprise and interest at this, saying that he had never seen the volume or heard of it,

before the fall of that fortress, which was coincident with the death of General Montcalm, and was followed by the surrender of Canada to the British power.

The letter was first printed, both in French and in an English translation (the pages of each made to face those of the other), in 1777, in a small pamphlet, with the following title: "Lettres de Monsieur le Marquis de Montcalm, Gouverneur-Général en Canada; à Messieurs de Berryer & de la Molé. Ecrites dans les Années 1757, 1758, & 1759. Avec une Version Angloise. *** A Londres: Chez J. Almon, vis-à-vis de Burlingtonhouse, Piccadilly, M.D.CC.LXXVII." A corresponding English title follows on the opposite page, facing this. Besides the letter to Molé, the pamphlet contains two letters addressed to "M. de Berryer, first Commissioner of the Marine of France,”. -one written in the year 1757, and the other in 1758, - both dated from Montreal.

In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for July, 1777, at page 342, is a notice of this publication, the writer giving an extract from one of the letters, and concluding thus: "The whole is worth perusal, and shows that M. de Montcalm was tam Mercurio quam Marti. It is proper to add, that the authenticity of the work was lately attacked in the House of Lords by Lord Shelburne, but ably defended by Lord Mansfield." This debate will be found in the Parliamentary Register (Supplement), vol. vii. pp. 122, 126, 127, under the date of May 30, 1777. On the titlepage of a copy of Almon's pamphlet, among the Ebeling collection in Harvard-College Library, Mr. Sparks has written: "The letters are unquestionably spurious." Of course, these criticisms apply to the two letters addressed to Berryer, as well as to the letter to Molé.

A French writer, the Abbé Pierre de Longchamps, in a "Histoire Impartiale des Evénemens Militaires et Politiques de la Dernière Guerre," &c., published at Amsterdam and at Paris in 1785, at vol. i. p. 6, cites an opinion of an eminent Englishman (without giving his name), expressed during the French war; namely, that Canada was the guard of the English Colonies, and he wondered why the ministry wished to conquer it. Leading from the reference to this Englishman in the text, the writer has a footnote as follows: "L'auteur anonyme des Lettres imprimées sous le nom de Montcalm, & faussement attribuées à ce Général. Quoique publiées pour la première fois en 1777. elles avoient été composées dès 1757. C'est le premier ouvrage où l'on trouve la révolution actuelle de l'Amérique prédite d'un ton ferme & ses causes clairement énoncées." Mr. Sparks, who copied this note of Longchamps upon the titlepage of the copy of Montcalm's Letters in the College Library, has written under the note the following: "Query. Were the letters written in 1757?"— EDS.