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DISCOURSE.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:

The Board of Trustees, charged with the management of this ancient Institution, were pleased to do me the honour to invite me to take part with them in the proceedings of this day; and my young friends, the Students of the College, in a very flattering manner, added the expression of their wishes to those of the corporation. So honourable a call, coming to me from so high and respected a source, and so persuasively enforced, I have not been able to resist, however unequal I feel myself to the performance of the duty which has been assigned me, in a manner to justify your selection, or worthy of the occasion.

An occasion of more interest and dignity rarely occurs in the course of human affairs. We are met to receive, publicly and solemnly, the silent yet eloquent memorials achieved by grateful art, of the person and virtues of one of the illustrious patriots of the land of our forefathers, whose name this Institution is proud to bear-the immortal champion of civil and religious freedom, John Hampden. These

memorials are now before you. The one is a medallion portrait of that great man, executed in the noble simplicity and purity of his own character, the other, a copy in marble of the monument erected to his memory by the gratitude of his countrymen on the field, in which he gloriously fell in defence of the liberties of his country and of mankind. The monument stands in Chalgrove Field, Oxfordshire, and was erected there on the 18th day of June 1843, being the two hundredth anniversary of the day of the glorious martyrdom which it commemorates. It tells its own story in a noble and eloquent inscription far more impressive than any words I can use, and I beg leave, therefore, to read so much of it as is essential to the merits of its object:

"Here in this Field of Chalgrove, John Hampden, after an able and strenuous, but unsuccessful resistance, in Parliament and before the Judges of the land, to the measures of an arbitrary court, first took arms, assembling the levies of the associated counties of Buckingham and Oxford in 1642; and here, within a few paces of this spot, he received the wound of which he died, while fighting in defence of the ancient liberties of England, June the 18th, 1643. In the two hundredth year from that day, this stone was raised in reverence to his memory."

It could not fail to be gratifying to every lover of liberty to read over the list of proud and lofty names, the most elevated in rank and the most dignified by station, which concurred in this warm and approving verdict of a distant posterity upon the principles and actions of one of the stanchest advocates which the

cause of popular freedom ever had. But I must content myself here with merely stating that the family of Hampden in England, learning with pride that an Institution existed in this country, bearing the name of their honoured ancestor, and dedicated to the cause of sound learning, and to the promotion of those principles of civil and religious liberty for which that ancestor had freely offered up his life, eagerly sought the occasion to present to it the interesting memorials which are now before us. So graceful an act of international courtesy, drawing together distant people by the kindly offices of mutual sympathy and recognition, deserves to be acknowledged, to be appreciated, to be imitated. It is an offering which does honour to the high character of those from whom it proceeds, and which this Institution, by many titles, is worthy to receive.

An Institution which started into existence under the fresh impulse of our own great contest for freedom-whose first session was opened on the first day of that year which ushered in the Declaration of American Independence-whose patriotic founders significantly proclaimed to the world the lofty principles with which, at that soul-stirring period, their own bosoms were animated, by assuming for their symbols the names of Hampden and of Sydney-an Institution, in short, which boasts at the head of its first Board of Trustees the name of Patrick Henry, a name to liberty and to eloquence ever dear, cannot be an unfit depository of those memorials of the model statesman and patriot of England, which are now committed to its keeping. These are glorious recol

lections for you, gentlemen, upon whom the government of this Institution has descended-instructive and inspiring for the generous youth who are now forming themselves for virtue and usefulness, under your charge. I heartily join with you in the feelings they are so well fitted to awaken; and my earnest prayer is that the kindred spirits of Hampden and of Henry, united in immortal fellowship here, may ever continue to shed the holy influence of patriotism and of virtue, of liberty and religion, within and around these halls.

To comprehend properly the great lessons of wisdom and virtue involved in the career and example of Hampden, we must go back to the times in which he lived; and surely no period in the history of man deserves to be more profoundly studied by the free citizens of America. It carries us into the midst of the most august and eventful scenes, and into the presence of the most renowned actors that have ever appeared upon the theatre of human affairs. On the continent of Europe, as in England, it was the period signalized by the struggles of liberty against despotism, of the heroic resistance of the people against their oppressors. It was the period which witnessed the long protracted and bitter agony of a seventy years sanguinary conflict, through which the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the infant Republic of Holland, by prodigies of valour, of patriotism and of enterprise, nobly won their independence from the cruel and unrelenting despotism of Spain. A nobler struggle for freedom, richer in great deeds of civic virtue or military prowess, is not recorded in the annals of human

kind, and challenges with peculiar force the sympathy and admiration of an American bosom, from the striking parallel, if not model, it furnished in so many particulars, to our own glorious contest for independence and self-government.

At the same epoch, all Europe was convulsed by the thirty years war in Germany, a war waged in defence of civil and religious liberty against the tyranny and bigotry of Ferdinand of Austria, and forever consecrated to the sympathies of mankind by the romantic chivalry, the christian heroism and miraculous achievements of Gustavus Adolphus, who, when lying prostrate amid the heaps of slain which surrounded and almost covered him on the field of Lutzen, being asked who he was, replied, "I am the King of Sweden; and seal with my blood the protestant religion and liberties of Germany." And such, indeed, was the precious purchase of his blood; for his brave and devoted countrymen, animated by his example and his dying words, and led by the firm and sagacious councils of his surviving minister and friend, Oxenstiern, never relaxed in the sacred cause which was bequeathed to them, till, aided by the then rapidly culminating power of France under the bold and steady impulse of the genius of Richelieu in the cabinet, and of Turenne and the great Condé in the field, they secured its final triumph at the Peace of Westphalia.

France herself had just passed through the bloody fratricidal conflict of her civil and religious wars, of which her Montmorencys, her Colignys, and her Guises were successively and alternately the heroes and the victims. Her wounds had been temporarily

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