"There are associations in my mind with those two eminent and beloved names which appeal too strongly to me to be resisted. Now I have a favor to ask which I hope will not be denied. It is that I may be allowed to present to the Academy that portrait in my own name. You can appreciate the arguments which have influenced my wishes in this respect. Allston was more than any other person my master in art. Leslie was my life-long cherished friend and fellow pupil, whom I loved as a brother. We all lived together for years in the closest intimacy and in the same house. Is there not then a fitness that the portrait of the master by one distinguished pupil should be presented by the surviving pupil to the Academy over which he presided in its infancy, as well as assisted in its birth, and, although divorced from Art, cannot so easily be divorced from the memories of an intercourse with these distinguished friends, an intercourse which never for one moment suffered interruption, even from a shadow of estrangement?" It is needless to say that this generous offer was accepted, and Morse at the same time presented to the Academy the brush which Allston was using when stricken with his fatal illness. As his means permitted he made generous donations to charities and to educational institutions, and on May 20, 1865, he endowed by the gift of $10,000 a lectureship in the Union Theological Seminary, making the following request in the letter which accompanied it:-- "If it be thought advisable that the name of the lectureship, as was suggested, should be the Morse Lectureship, I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is so named in honor of my venerated and distinguished father, whose zealous labors in the cause of theological education, and in various benevolent enterprises, as well as of geographical science, entitle his memory to preservation in connection with the efforts to diffuse the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and his gospel throughout the world." Curiously enough I find no reference in the letters of the year 1865 to the assassination of President Lincoln, but I well remember being taken, a boy of eight, to our stable on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street, from the second-floor windows of which we watched the imposing funeral cortège pass up the avenue. The fifty-fifth reunion of his class of 1810 took place in this year, and Morse reluctantly decided to absent himself. The reasons why he felt that he could not go are given in a long letter of August 11 to his cousin, Professor E.S. Salisbury, and it is such a clear statement of his convictions that I am tempted to give it almost in its entirety:--