the token of concentrated regards than as the means of advancement; yet greatly heightened in practical importance by the testimony it implied from the best of all witnesses. That honor, three times renewed, was attended by passages of excitement which look dizzy even in the distance--with much on my part requiring allowance, and much allowance rendered by those to whom my utmost services were due; with the painful consciousness of wide difference of opinion between some of my oldest friends and myself, and with painful contests which those differences rendered inevitable, yet cheered by attachments which the vivid lights struck out in the conflict of contending passions exhibited in scatheless strength, until I received that appointment which dissolved the parliamentary connection, and with it annihilated all the opposition of feeling which had sometimes saddened it, and invested the close of my life with the old regard, as unclouded by controversy as when it illumined its opening. And now the expressions of your sympathy await me, when, by the gracious providence of God, I have been permitted to enter on a course of less fervid action, of serener thought, of plainer duty. For me political animosities are forever hushed and absorbed in one desire, which I share with you all, for the happiness and honor of our country, and the peaceful advancement of our species; and all the feverish excitements and perils of advocacy, its ardent partisanship with various interests, anxieties, and passions, are displaced by the office of seeking to discover truth and to maintain justice. I am no longer incited to aspire to public favor, even under your auspices: my course is marked right onward--to be steadily trodden, whether its duties may accord with the prevalent feeling of the hour, or may oppose the temporary injustice of its generous errors: but it is not forbidden me to prize the esteem of those who have known me longest and best, and to indulge the hope that I may retain it to the last. To encourage me in the aim still to deserve that esteem, I shall look on this gift of those numbers of my townsmen whose regards have just found such cordial expression. I shall cherish it as a memorial of earliest hopes that gleam out from the depth of years; as a memorial of a thousand incentives to virtuous endeavor, of sacred trusts, of delighted solaces; as a memorial of affections which have invested a being, frail, sensitive, and weak, with strength not its own, and under God, have insured for it an honorable destiny; as a memorial of this hour, when, in the presence of those who are nearest and dearest to me on earth, my course has been pictured in the light of those friendships which have gladdened it--an hour of which the memory and the influence will not pass away, but, I fondly trust, will incite those who will bear my name after me, and to whose charge this gift will be confided when I shall cease to behold it, better to deserve, though they cannot