once on the policy pursued by the government, and on the policy recommended by the opposition. But death at once restored him to his old place in the affection of his country. Who could hear unmoved of the fall of that which had been so great, and which had stood so long? The circumstances, too, seemed rather to belong to the tragic stage than to real life. A great statesman, full of years and honours, led forth to the senate-house by a son of rare hopes, and stricken down in full council while straining his feeble voice to rouse the drooping spirit of his country, could not but be remembered with peculiar veneration and tenderness. Detraction was overawed. The voice even of just and temperate censure was mute. Nothing was remembered but the lofty genius, the unsullied probity, the undisputed services, of him who was no more. For once, all parties were agreed. A public funeral, a public monument, were eagerly voted. The debts of the deceased were paid. A provision was made for his family. The city of London requested that the remains of the great man whom she had so long loved and honoured might rest under the dome of her magnificent cathedral. But the petition came too late. Everything was already prepared for the interment in Westminster Abbey.

Though men of all parties had concurred in decreeing posthumous honours to Chatham, his corpse was attended to the grave almost exclusively by opponents of the government. The banner of the lordship of Chatham was borne by Colonel Barré, attended by the Duke of Richmond and Lord Rockingham. Burke, Savile, and Dunning upheld the pall. Lord Camden was conspicuous in the procession. The chief mourner was young William Pitt. After the lapse of more than twenty-seven years, in a season as dark and perilous, his own shattered frame and broken heart were laid, with the same pomp, in the same consecrated mould.

Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other Cemetery do so many great citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable graves towers the stately

monument of Chatham, and from above, his own effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl defiance at her foes. The generation which reared that memorial of him has disappeared. The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliberately pronounce, that, among the eminent men whose bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, and none a more splendid name.

SPEECH

ON HIS INSTALLATION AS LORD RECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW.

[March 21, 1849.]

My first duty, gentlemen, is to return you my thanks for the high honour you have conferred on me. That honour, as you well know, was wholly unsolicited, and I can assure you it was wholly unexpected. I may add, that if I had been invited to become a candidate for your suffrages, I should have respectfully declined the invitation. My predecessor, whom I am so happy as to be able to call my friend -declared from this place last year, in language which well became him, that he would not have come forward to displace so eminent a statesman as Lord John Russel. I can with equal truth declare that I would not have come forward to displace so estimable a gentleman and so accomplished a man as Colonel Mure. But he felt last year that it was not for him, and I feel this year that it is not for me, to question the propriety of your decision, in a point on which, by the constitution of your body, you are the sole judges. I therefore accept with thankfulness the office to which I am called, fully purposing to use whatever powers belong to it with the single view of the promotion of the credit and the welfare of this university.

that

I am not using a mere phrase, of course, when I say the feelings with which I bear a part in the ceremony of this day, are such as I find it difficult to utter in words. I do not think it strange, that when that great master of eloquence, Edmund Burke, stood where I now stand, he faltered and remained mute. Doubtless the multitude of thoughts which rushed into his mind were such as even he could not easily arrange or express. In truth, there are

few spectacles more striking or affecting, than that which a great historical place of education presents on a solemn public day.

There is something strangely interesting in the contrast between the venerable antiquity of the body and the fresh and ardent youth of the great majority of the members. Recollections and hopes crowd upon us together. The past and the future are at once brought close to us. Our thoughts wander back to the time when the foundations of this ancient building were laid, and forward to the time when those whom it is our office to guide and to teach will be the guides and teachers of our posterity. On the present occasion we may, with peculiar propriety, give such thoughts their course. For it has chanced that my magistracy has fallen in a great secular epoch. This is the four hundredth year of the existence of your university. At such jubilees as these jubilees of which no individual sees more than one-it is natural, it is good, that a society like this-a society which survives all the transitory parts of which it is composed a society which has a corporate existence and a perpetual succession, should review its annals, should retrace the stages of its growth, from infancy to maturity, and should try to find in the experience of generations which have passed away, lessons which may be profitable to generations yet unborn. The retrospect is full of interest and instruction.

Perhaps it may be doubted whether, since the Christian era, there has been any point of time more important to the highest interests of mankind than that at which the existence of your university commenced. It was the moment of a great destruction and of a great creation. Your society was instituted just before the empire of the east perishedthat strange empire, which, dragging on a languid life through the great age of darkness, connected together the two great ages of light-that empire which, adding nothing to our stores of knowledge, and producing not one man great in letters, in science, or in art, yet preserved, in the midst of barbarism, those master-pieces of Attic genius which the highest minds still contemplate, and long will contemplate, with admiring despair; and, at that very time, while the fanatical Moslem were plundering the churches and palaces of Constantinople, breaking in pieces Grecian

sculpture, and giving to the flames piles of Grecian eloquence, a few humble German artisans, who little knew that they were calling into existence a power far mightier than that of the victorious sultan, were busied in cutting and setting the first types. The University came into existence just in time to see the last trace of the Roman empire disappear, and to see the earliest printed book.

At this conjuncture a conjuncture of unrivalled interest in the history of letters-a man never to be mentioned without reverence by every lover of letters, held the highest place in Europe. Our just attachment to that Protestant faith to which our country owes so much, must not prevent us from paying the tribute which, on this occasion and in this place, justice and gratitude demand to the founder of the University of Glasgow, the greatest of the revivers of learning, Pope Nicholas the Fifth. He had sprung from the common people; but his abilities and his erudition had early attracted the notice of the great. He had studied much and travelled far. He had visited Great Britain, which, in wealth and refinement, was to his native Tuscany what the back settlements of American now are to Britain. He had lived with the merchant princess of Florence, those men who first ennobled trade by making trade the ally of philosophy, of eloquence, and of taste. It was he who, under the protection of the munificent and discerning Cosmo, arrayed the first public library that modern Europe possessed. From privacy your founder rose to a throne; but on the throne he never forgot the studies which had been his delight in privacy. He was the centre of an illustrious group, composed partly of the last great scholars of Greece, and partly of the first great scholars of Italy, Theodore Gaza and George of Trebizond, Bessarin and Tilelfo, Marsilio Ficino and Poggio Bracciolini. By him was founded the Vatican library, then and long after the most precious and the most extensive collection of books in the world. By him were carefully preserved the most valuable intellectual treasures which had been snatched from the wreck of the Byzantine empire. His agents were to be found everywhere in the bazaars of the farthest East, in the monasteries of the farthest West-purchasing or copying wormeaten parchments, on which were traced words worthy of immortality. Under his patronage were prepared accurate