There were many persons who graduated before my time or shortly afterward whose high place in the public life of the Commonwealth and of the country was assured before they were thirty years old. Edward Everett was called to the pulpit of Brattle Street Church at the age of nineteen. He succeeded in that pulpit Joseph Stevens Buckminster, who was himself settled over that important parish at the age of twenty-one and was a wonderful pulpit orator. Edward Everett preached a sermon when he was twenty-four years old before a large audience in the Representatives Chamber at Washington which was heard with breathless silence. Rufus King said it was the best sermon he ever heard, and Harrison Gray Otis was affected to tears. Benjamin R. Curtis was admitted to the bar in Boston when he was twenty-two years old and shortly after was retained in a very important case. It is said that an old deputy sheriff, who had just heard Curtis's opening argument, was met in the street and asked if anything was going on in court. "Going on?" was the reply. "There's a young chap named Curtis up there has just opened a case so that all Hell can't close it." I suppose Edward Everett Hale and James Freeman Clarke were almost as famous in the pulpit when they were twenty-five or twenty-six years old as they ever were afterward. I might extend the catalogue indefinitely. Where is there to be found to-day at the New England bar or in the New England pulpit a man under thirty of whom it can be said that his place among the great men of his profession is assured? It will not do to say in answer to this that it takes a greater man in this generation to fill such a place than it took in other days. That is not true. The men of those generations have left their work behind them. It does not suffer in comparison with that of their successors. There was something in the college training of that day, imperfect as were its instruments, and slender as were its resources, from which more intellectual strength in the pupil was begotten than there is in the college training of the present generation. I will not undertake to account for it. But I think it was due in large part to the personality of the instructors. A youth who contemplated with a near and intimate knowledge the large manhood of Josiah Quincy; who listened to the eloquence of James Walker, or heard his expositions of the principal systems of ethics or metaphysics; or who sat at the feet of Judge Story, as he poured forth the lessons of jurisprudence in a clear and inexhaustible stream, caught an inspiration which transfigured the very soul of the pupil.