“_Resolved_, That the members of the Mercantile Library Association of Boston, without distinction of party, most respectfully tender to the Hon. Charles Sumner their kindest feelings of sympathy and esteem, and earnestly hope, that, by the blessing of Divine Providence, he may resume his seat in Congress, and reiterate those principles of humanity which every institution, whether political or literary, should most earnestly espouse. “_Resolved_, That the Corresponding Secretary of this Association is hereby requested to furnish the Hon. Charles Sumner with an appropriate copy of these resolves.” The sentiments of the medical profession appear in a speech and toast by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, at the dinner of the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the Revere House, Boston. “Look into the chamber where our own fellow-citizen, struck down without warning by the hand of brutal violence, lies prostrate, and think what fearful issues hang on the skill or incompetence of those who have his precious life in charge. One little error, and the _ignis sacer_, the fiery plague of the wounded, spreads his angry blush over the surface, and fever and delirium are but the preludes of deadlier symptoms. One slight neglect, and the brain, oppressed with the products of disease, grows dreamy, and then drowsy, its fine energies are palsied, and too soon the heart that filled it with generous blood is still forever. It took but a little scratch from a glass, broken at his daughter’s wedding, to snatch from life the great anatomist and surgeon, Spigelius, almost at the very age of him for whose recovery we look, not without anxious solicitude. “At such a moment as this, more than at any other, we feel the dignity, the awful responsibility, of the healing art. Let but that life be sacrificed, and left unavenged, and the wounds of that defenceless head, like the foul witch’s blow on her enchanted image, are repeated on the radiant forehead of Liberty herself, and flaw the golden circlet we had vainly written with the sacred name of Union! “‘Dî, prohibete minas! Dî, talem avertite casum!’ “I give you, Mr. President,-- “_The Surgeons of the City of Washington._--God grant them wisdom! for they are dressing the wounds of a mighty empire, and of uncounted generations.” Hon. Josiah Quincy, in the eighty-fifth year of his age, addressed a letter to the Unitarian Festival, in which he said:--