A little way off sits one of the most accomplished orators in all that gifted group; a genial companion you may see he is at a glance. He is a ripe scholar, educated in an English university, and yet warm with a loving nature that glows on his face and through his graceful discourse. Wielding a ready pen, whose vigorous strokes have already, in the Memorial of Congress to British America, cleft the unwilling hearts of Canadians, and, in The Address of Congress to the People of Great Britain, have imbedded forever in the English Constitution the principles of representation as the basis of taxation, Richard Henry Lee, from South Carolina, three years older than Adams, sits there in cultured ease and thoughtful dignity, a model legislator. In the preceding month of June he had moved a resolution, asserting the rights of the Colonies to be free, and to dissolve in brine the ligaments which wickedly tied them to the money-making law manufactory at home. This resolution, having of course been well debated when it came up for consideration three days ago,—for American Congresses were never deaf or dumb asylums,—had been adopted, and upon it a committee raised, whose report, drawn by Jefferson, and revised by Franklin and Adams, is to be read in to-day’s session. A few feet away are Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who, although only in his twenty-third summer, is laden with the sheaves of a rich harvest of oratorical fame; Charles Carroll of Maryland, who, annexing to the Declaration his address, so that he might not be passed by the state executioner for his treason, was spared by death to be the last of that memorable party on earth; Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who lived to fill acceptably every honorable office known to our system of government, except that of President; and Robert R. Livingston of New York, who survived the recordership of the city of New York, and became eminent, not only in many fields, but notably on the Hudson River, in connection with Robert Fulton’s efforts to subject water to steam,—not one of them, except Carroll, yet thirty-three years of age. Leaning forward and near this last group stands the bulky figure of one who was for the first twenty-two years of his life a shoemaker; but who, disregarding the maxim of Horace “to stick to the last,” left the lapstone to attend to the understandings of his suffering countrymen. This, all know, is Roger Sherman of Connecticut, true to independence and well-grounded freedom—to the last.