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388 be paid in advance to the Mount Vernon fund. Mr. Everett also invited the readers of the " Ledger " to transmit each the sum of fifty cents or more toward the same object, and this appeal produced more that $3,000. ' On 22 Dec, 1857, he delivered an address on charity and charitable associations for the benefit of the Boston provident association, which was repeated fifteen times, with receipts of about 113,500. On 17 Jan., 1859, he delivered an address in Boston on the " Early Days of Franklin," which was repeated five times, yielding about f 4,000 to various institutions. The receipts of these lectures were not less than $90,000. A notice of the " Life and Works of Daniel Webster," by Mr. Everett, is included in the collective edition of the works of the former (6 vols., Boston, 1852). From his pen also came the "Life of General Stark," in Sparks's "American Biography." and several of the annual reports of the Massachusetts board of education. At the instance of Lord Mac- aiday, he contributed a life of Washington to the " Encyclopaedia Britannica " (published separately, New "York, 1860). Mr. Everett had substantial claims to the character of a poet. His dirge of " Alaric the Visigoth " and the beautiful poem of "Santa Croce" are among the few compositions that the remembrance of school-boy declamation can present without fear of rebuke to the maturer judgment of riper years. In addition to the " De- fence of Christianity," already mentioned, and oc- casional addresses, official letters, reports, etc., Mr. Everett published " Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions " (Boston, 1830); " Impor- tance of Practical Education and Useful Knowl- edge," a selection from his " Orations and other Discourses," published in 1836, originally prepared for the Massachusetts district-school library at the request of the Board of education (New York, 1817); "Orations and Speeches on Various Occa- sions from 1826 to 1850" (2d ed., 2 vols., Boston, 1850; this edition includes all that were in the edition of 1830; 3d ed., 2 vols., 1853). These volumes contain eighty-one articles. The third volume of Everett's " Orations and Speeches " (Boston, 1859) contains forty-six articles, and also a copious index to the contents of the three volumes. Volume IV. of the " Orations and Speeches " (Boston, 1859) contains fifty-nine arti- cles. Those who would witness a remarkable illus- tration of the power of eloquence to transfuse life and beauty into the teachings of science, the les- sons of history, the ethics of politics, and vicissi- tudes of letters, will not neglect to devote their " days and nights " to the orations of Edward Ev- erett. The first oration that drew upon Mr. Ever- ett the eyes of his countrymen at large was deliv- ered at Cambridge before the Phi Beta Kappa society, 27 Aug., 1824. The subject was, " The Cir- cumstances Favorable to the Progress of Literature in America." When the youthful orator had ex- cited to a painful pitch the feelings of the vast assemblage, he suddenly turned to the illustrious guest, Lafayette, who had seen so much of the rise and fall of human greatness, who had witnessed alike the destruction of a throne and the birth of a nation, and addressed him in an apostrophe never to be forgotten by auditor or reader. Perhaps Mr. Everett's powers as an orator are nowhere dis- played to greater advantage than in that passage in his Fourth of July address delivered at Dorches- ter, Mass., in 1855, in which he epitomizes, in a single eloquent paragraph, the far-reaching conse- quences of the battle of Lexington. He said: " On the 19th of April the all-important blow was struck; the blow which severed the fated chain whose every link was bolted by an act of parliament, whose every rivet was closed up by an order in council — which bound to the wake of Europe the brave bark of our youthful fortune, destined henceforth and forever to ride the waves alone — the blow which severed that fated chain was struck. The blow was struck which will be felt in its consequences to our- selves and the family of nations till the seventh seal is broken from the apocalyptic volume of the history of empires. The consummation of four centuries was completed. The life-long hopes and heart-sick visions of Columbus, poorly fulfilled in the subjugation of the plumed tribes of a few trop- ical islands, and the partial survey of the conti- nent; cruelly mocked by the fetters placed upon his noble limbs by his own menial and which he carried with him into his grave, were at length more than fulfilled, when the new world of his dis- covery put on the sovereign robes of her separate national existence, and joined, for peace and for war, the great Panathenaic procession of the na- tions. The wrongs of generations were redressed. The cup of humiliation drained to the dregs by the old puritan confessors and nonconformist victims of oppression — loathsome prisons, blasted fortunes, lips forl)idden to open in prayer, earth and water denied in their pleasant native land, the separations and sorrows of exile, the sounding perils of the ocean, the scented hedge-rows and vocal thickets of the ' old countrie ' exchanged for a pathless wilder- ness ringing with the war-whoop and gleaming with the scalping-knife; the secular insolence of colonial rule, checked by no periodical recurrence to the public will; governors appointed on the other side of the globe that knew not Joseph; the patronizing disdain of undelegated power; the legal contumely of foreign law, wanting the first element of obligation, the consent of the governed expressed by his authorized representative; and at length the last unutterable and burning affront and shame, a mercenary soldiery encamped upon the fair emi- nences of our cities, ships of war with springs on their cables moored in front of our crowded quays, artillery planted open-mouthed in our principal streets, at the doors of our houses of assembly, their morning and evening salvos proclaiming to the ris- ing and the setting sun that we are the subjects and they the lords— all these hideous phantoms of the long colonial night swept off by the first sharp volley on Lexington Green." An eloquent review of Mr. Everett's orations, l)y Prof. Cornelius C. Felton, was published in the " North American Review " for October, 1850, and an admirable an- alysis of his mental characteristics and oratorical style, by a distinguished critic, himself an orator of renown, Geoi'ge S. Hillard, will be found in the same periodical for January, 1837. We give a brief extract from the latter: " The great charm of Mr. Everett's orations consists not so much in any single and strongly developed intellectual trait as in that symmetry and finish which, on every page, give "token to the richly endowed and thorough scholar. The natural movements of his mind are full of grace: and the most indifferent sentence which falls from his pen has that simple elegance which it is as difficult to de- fine as it is easy to perceive. His level passages are never tame, and his fine ones are never super- fine. His style, with matchless flexibility, rises and falls with his subject, and is alternately easy, vivid, elevated, ornamented, or picturesque, adapt- ing itself to the dominant mood of the mind, as an instrument responds to the touch of a master's hand. His knowledge is so extensive and the field of his allusions so wide, that the most