Page:'Tis Sixty Years Since.djvu/17

Rh which found their representative types in the two Jacksons,—Andrew, and him known in history as "Stonewall." To Alec Haskell I shall in this discourse again have occasion to refer.

Thus, though in 1853, and for long years subsequent thereto, it would not have entered my mind as among the probabilities that I should ever stand here, reviewing the past after the manner of Tennyson in his "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," yet if there was any place in the South, or, I may say, in the entire country, where, as a matter of association, I might naturally have looked so to stand, it would have been where now I find myself.

But I must hasten on; for, as I have said, if I am to accomplish even a part of my purpose, I have no time wherein to linger.

Not long ago I chanced, in a country ramble, to be conversing with an eminent foreigner, known, and favorably known, to all Americans. In the course of leisurely exchange of ideas between us, he suddenly asked if I could suggest any explanation of the fact that not only were the publicists who had the greatest vogue in our college days now to a large extent discredited, but that almost every view and theory advanced by them, and which we had accepted as fixed and settled, was, where not actually challenged, silently ignored. Nor did the assertion admit of denial; for, looking back through the vista of threescore years, of the principles of what may be called "public polity" then advanced as indisputable,